2001-03-15
feeling kinda
this month's topic for Fugue: dreams.
The Sideshow Inside My Head
if it were possible to videotape my dreams, i'd be a happy camper. i swear, i dream entire spy novels some nights; long, involved, Ken Follett/Tom Clancy/John le Carr� sorts of things with highly involved plot twists and subplots. if only i could tape them and transcribe them, i could make a killing as an author. no pun intended.
i long to be able to replay my dreams because somehow trying to describe them is unsatisfying. the words are never there to capture just that quirk, or just this shade of blue, or explain what the house looked like, or make sense out of how i had to escape down the drain in the sauna but ended up balanced on top of a ladder trying to leap across to the other platform. they're quite interesting, these dreams. and you might even like them, if i could just figure out how to tell you what happened.
i mean, if i just gave you the snatches i remember, you'd think i was crazy. how else could you explain this: it starts walking along the road by the beach. it sort of looks like Bar Harbor, but then again it's sort of like a place i grew up, and a little like Monument Beach. and then again it's none of them. the houses, hobbit-hole like, are right against the side of the dune, the land side of which is quite forest-like. the other side of the dune drops down to a shallow beach, and the tide comes in like the Bay of Fundy, all the way to the top of the dunes, taking out the boardwalks and pounding on the houses. the people in the houses sit by the picture windows, unconcerned and having tea. there's more to this part, and i've forgotten it. later, i'm on a hilly sort of golf course, having fled along some sort of semi-paved road bed over gullies by way of a few boards thrown down. and now i'm being pursued by badgers with Stens. don't ask. but at the time, it made sense.
sometimes, my dreams deal with things going on in my life - the trial popped up a few times, and job things often float in there. and when i'm stressed about change, i dream that my apartment has been robbed. this started right after my apartment actually was robbed, which i apparently subliminated as some metaphor for letting go of the past and moving on. the robbery dreams were a little scary when they started, because the apartment in my dream looked enough like my real apartment that it would take a while to sort out that i was in dreamtime. and the first few times, i was attacked from behind by the robber (which did not happen in real life). ever have a dream where you feel a physical sensation? i could feel it. i was being strangled and somersaulted head over heels all at once - very freaky. it took mammoth amounts of concentration to surface from that, sort of like pulling yourself out of a whirlpool. now, i can tell by the light that it's another robbery dream, and sometimes i talk my way into waking up.
but more often than not, my dreams are highly random. or at least, the themes and images that keep cropping up don't have any apparent direct connection to the surface of my life. there are places that i've never seen that keep appearing, one ramshackle old house in particular; some images, like stairs, show up frequently. my dream dictionary says that the landings on stairs correlate to the body's chakras. hm. wonder if i dream about stairs when i feel blocked?
i think i dream every night. i don't always remember my dreams; generally, i forget them after a few days, altho one dream i had about a whirlpool nearly 20 years ago has stuck with me to this day. mostly i dream in color; sometimes i know i'm dreaming, and once in a while, i can direct the dream. that happened once when i was dreaming about flying (fear of heights makes that not such a fun dream). somehow, it clicked that i was in control, and all of a sudden, i could fly anywhere i wanted, swooping between the wires i had been about to hit. it was the most liberating sensation. interestingly, i don't remember having a flying dream since then.
i don't put a lot of stock in interpreting dreams. they're an interesting window into the subconscious, and Freud would have a field day there, and that's pretty much it. except for once. there was one dream i had that might not have been a dream. it could have been... well, some of the women in my family have said they have a sixth sense about things. and it might have been like that. i lost someone who could have been very dear to me, and had a hard time with it until one night when Corwyn showed up in my dreams. beautiful little boy, with dark hair and blue eyes, telling me that it was alright to let go. and it was. it was, because he was saying so. for once, i know it wasn't my subconscious talking. it was someone reaching me the only way he could. powerful things, these dreams.
