About Dreaming

A dream of struggle and certain death but at the same time oddly encouraging, even vital, a dream I wanted to remember, something that would make a great television show.

I was thinking this even as I was dreaming it. Or did the thinking part come later as I tried to pull back from waking, as the covers slipped and my feet got cold and the pillow dropped to the floor?

Dreams are often, not always, but often, fragile things, impossible to hold onto. The dreams that become nightmares are the easy ones to recall because they never leave you.

They hold on like a stink.

Dreams for sleep

It’s early but not crazy early. Sleep has been a little less difficult recently although the dreams have been markedly more vivid. Is there a trade-off that takes place in the brain, an extra hour of sleep in return for letting the brain run wild dreaming? There doesn’t appear to be any similarity in the stories my brain has been spinning – except one.

The settings are all different, the people who inhabit the dreams are unrecognizable, there’s nothing sexy going on and I never feel in danger or wake up in a cold sweat. The dreams are, for the most part, uneventful. The running similarity in these recent dreams is that I generally find myself in an odd situation, some place I probably shouldn’t be, an unauthorized visitor of one sort or another.

The scenarios are all different; one time a delivery man, another time a traveler and yet another time just a man looking for a warm place to pass the night. Usually the other inhabitants of these dreams react with curiosity or confusion, sometimes there’s a measure of suspicion, but never fear or hostility.

Do any of you expats out there experience similar dreams? Is this a “stranger in a strange land” dream experience we share?

Dreams that linger

The dream itself was disturbing enough.

It was one of those dreams where nothing was what it appeared to be, where things (including me) changed and morphed constantly throughout the dream. I had done something wrong, terrible even, but I wasn’t clear about exactly what it was. I found myself in a grotto-room-hotel with another man, someone I thought was an ally but who turned out to be my enemy. There were people coming in and out of the dream, room service staff who seemed to be bringing me something to eat or drink only to pull out a syringe and try to inject me with some sort of drug. I fought them unsuccessfully and then I too morphed, I could feel my body changing, hardening in spots, swelling and then I began to float above the room. It was at about that point in the dream that my wife and son appeared, and, because this was a dream, it didn’t seem odd that they would suddenly be there with me. As I recall the dream this morning, I remember thinking we must be on some sort of holiday together. But it didn’t feel like a holiday and I knew something was terribly wrong so I woke my wife (in the dream) and told her to go check on our son and she turned to me with a very scary look on her face and laughed an evil laugh and began to upbraid me for something. It was at that point that I started shouting: ”Get up, Get up and check on him!” And I thought I was awake, but I wasn’t, so I tried harder to wake and after what seemed to be a very long time, I was actually awake and I actually woke my wife and told her we needed to check on our son. She suggested that since I was the one who was wide-awake in the middle of the night that I should do it. I went into his room and saw that he had thrown off his covers and his pajama top was pulled up exposing his back, which was cold, but otherwise he was fine.

I got back into bed and here’s where things got odd – the dream wouldn’t go away. Every time I closed my eyes I was back in the dream. I was very tired and wanted to sleep, I was heavy with the need to sleep, but my mind wouldn’t allow me to escape this dreamspace. I don’t know how long it was before I fell back into nightmare free sleep, at one point I got out of bed again and later I tried a different sleeping position. In the end I conjured the image of my favorite place, a cabin deep in the Catskill Mountains, and I was finally able to go back to sleep. That said, here I am early, early on Sunday morning writing it all out. It was the first time in memory that a nightmare was so persistent and had such a strong physical component - I’ll be googling it later on this morning. Maybe you have had a similar experience?

Sweet dreams …

Dreams of me …

Some mornings I wake with a thought as clear and brittle as if it had been etched in my soul by decades of remembering; from reading or reciting it, or passing it, a scratching on a rock on a well-trod path, something from the very habit of life. Then later, before the fog of sleep has cleared I’ll try to put it down, make sense of it by writing it out. But if I don’t move swiftly, if I wait and do anything at all that requires my mushy mind to work, it evaporates, and the thought that had been so clear, the one that had driven me from my bed and into the kitchen, is gone. There is however a residue, and often it is something familiar, not as sharp as the waking dream perhaps, but unmistakable nonetheless; a fear, a worry, an obsession, a hope, and it lingers like the scent of a wet dog on my skin. This morning the day has begun with something like a dream of dying, a thought that has been on my mind lately, loosing a friend not long ago and more. Last night I was holding HH in my lap while brushing his teeth, when all at once he nuzzled his head into my chest and held himself there for a beat or two, then drew a huge smile on his face and said, “Papa, sitting on your tummy is wonderful. When I was a little baby I used to have so much fun playing with you.”

After I had put him to bed I sat where I am sitting right now and wondered how much he could possibly recall about our time together “when he was a baby.” He is only four. And I also wondered how much he would recall when he was older, when I was long gone. One of the curses of being a father at fifty it that you wonder (at least I do) about how long you will be with your child, how much time there will be to build memories, whether you will be remembered at all for the things that really took place or if the talk of you will be some mix of mostly fiction, colored with a dusting of fact from snapshots and home movies. In my experience, remembering your dreams (or much of anything else for that matter) is an exercise in creative writing, from the germ of the actual dream I fill in the blanks of the parts I’ve forgotten by the time I’ve fired up the keyboard and thrown down my first cup of coffee. Something like that; half-fiction, half-fact, a dreamy stew of the imagination, is what I imagine will be his memory of me.