Perchance to Dream

Someone should do a study on me.  Either there is a genius lurking in the recesses of my brain, or I’m severely disturbed.  Maybe both.  The stuff that goes on in there while the rest of my body is trying to sleep is getting stranger and stranger.

This looks a lot like the view from the house where I grew up.

I’ve always been a vivid dreamer.  I’m not talking about the usual stuff – you know, waiting naked at the bus stop, forgetting to attend classes all semester and then realizing you have to go take the final exam, or remembering on opening night that you’ve forgotten to memorize any lines at all; that kind of stuff is oatmeal for me.  Flying?  Please.  Been there done that so many times.  My favorite flying dreams are the ones (most of my best - and worst - dreams are recurring) where I climb a staircase to a plane hovering in the sky, then parachute out, and do it over and over and over again . . . of course, with no parachute.  It’s the darn power lines that worry me.  Then there are the tornado dreams (my earliest childhood terror) and other natural disaster dreams.  Standard fare.

When I was a little girl and had bad dreams, I had a couple of methods to stop them.  I either would climb to a tall place and jump off – I always hit the bottom and it would wake me up – or this little guy would pop out in a corner of the “screen” with a sign that said, “This is just a dream, wake up!”  One particularly terrifying recurring nightmare involved some pretty bad dudes who essentially wanted to burn me at the stake.  I finally told them one night that I was just a little kid and they needed to leave me alone until I was old enough to deal with them.  Seriously.  And it worked.  They never came back.  I was a little nervous on my eighteenth birthday that they might return at bedtime, but I guess that by then I was intimidating enough to scare them away . . .

My dreams are elaborate.  I dream in color.  I taste things.  I feel things.  I’ve felt bullets pierce my flesh and bury themselves deep inside me.  Having never actually been shot, I can’t say if my dream sensations are realistic, but within my dream realm, they’re real enough.  I will say I can never taste water while dreaming.  When I’m really thirsty in my sleep, water is the one thing that never satisfies.  I dream in chapters, with characters who appear early on as minor, insignificant players and who come back later with key roles in solving the mysteries or explaining strange events.  The plot twists boggle my mind, especially when characters from previous dreams show up with significant parts in a new dream, often revealing important details from a dream weeks or months earlier.

Imagine this, twice as high, with a straight vertical slope

I dream repeatedly about specific locations.  These aren’t places I’ve been to in real life --  why bother dreaming about places I’ve already been?  There’s a highway between St. Louis and Somewhere that I know by heart, including the big bend in that Little Town, and the motel where I always like to stop when I’m really tired.   Also near the arch in St. Louis is the High Bridge that I’m always afraid to drive over, even though I’ve never fallen off its sheer vertical slope.  I own two or three homes that I dream about repeatedly.  One of them has a basketball court sized room that I always forget about until I open the door once more.  Another one needs repairs on that back room; in the winter time it’s unbearably drafty in there.  In a third place, I’m still trying to find time to pull down the old wallpaper in the enormous library and brighten it up with a new coat of paint.  

In my dreams I speak many different languages.  I’m particularly fluent in Cat, which is more complicated than you might think.  While dreaming, I’m convinced that I’ll remember the “words” when I wake up, but as soon as I’m awake, none of the stuff makes sense.  That’s why I can’t write the dreams down.  As soon as I try to convert them into words, the story (which delivers itself to me in its entirety as a concept dripping in details) dissolves.   

It’s like cornstarch that has settled into the bottom of a dish of water.  You reach in to touch it and it’s solid as a rock, but when you try to pick it up, it dissolves back into the water and runs through your fingers. 

Yeah, no robes.  I know.

So last night was the nuttiest of them all.  I had a Harry Potter dream.  That may not be strange for other people, but it was my first and it surprised me, even while I was having it.  In the dream I was watching the latest movie, which of course means I was in it, but the ending was all mixed up and unfamiliar.  I kept wondering how I had forgotten all these cool and weird parts.  I didn’t remember there being a Quittage game in the 7^th movie, but there was (more flying, of course).   Finally, the entire cast started doing a line dance on the side of a high-rise building, and the windows were lighting up with our dance steps.  We were doing the Electric Slide which, of course, was not the dance we were doing at all.  I could describe the steps perfectly to you as long as I don’t actually try to write the words – then the dream will disappear.  The most I can tell you is that it was a mix of Thriller and the Tush Push.  Hermione and Neville were pretty good at it.  The rest of the dancers weren’t actually Potter characters, but they all belonged in my version of the story.

The weirdest thing about dreams is the need they create within me to talk about them – this need to describe something I’m completely incapable of describing.  What is it that drives me to try to put into words concepts that are solid as granite in my mind, but elusive as mercury when I try to confine them with words and paragraphs? 

I understand the bit about the extra rooms in my houses alluding to untapped potential.  I know what flying in my dreams means.  I comprehend the anxiety that’s expressed with the missed classes or the unmemorized lines.  But what’s up with all the drama?  Why can’t I just sleep at night?  After a night of dreaming I wake up exhausted, as if I’d stayed up all night watching old movies.  I long for the days when I was little and I would close my eyes and open them and it would magically be morning, as if no time had passed at all.  There's the kind of sleep I ache for.  A little rest for this hyperactive imagination.