I had a very vivid dream last night that’s really sticking with me so for no good reason I thought I would post it to the blog and submit my subconscious to group analysis. The facts of the dream aren’t even really all that interesting, but here goes.
I had a rental car and I was in a downtown urban setting. I parked the car and was walking alone when for some reason I asked a guy what the safest route to my destination was. It was broad daylight and the guy lead me up this stairwell where he then grabbed my arms, pulled them behind my back, slit my hand open with a knife and pointed a gun into my back. He told me he cut my hand and that there was a gun in my back and he showed me my hand which was sliced open across the palm. I thought about how dumb it was for me to ask a stranger for a safe route which in effect told him I was an easy target, but still I wasn’t all that scared and I was cooperating. I gave him my wallet, which contained no cash but all my credit cards and my keys. I thought he was going to be pissed I didn’t have any money, but it didn’t set him off or anything. So he took my stuff and went around the corner of the stairs where he started talking to three other guys. Not being sure what the proper etiquette was to being mugged and still sorta hoping he would return my keys or empty wallet, I thought better of it and made a dash for it. I got away, but of course had no wallet or keys and I was just hiding out in this largely brick and iron urban setting.
Here the transition to the next part of the dream gets a little fuzzy. I wander around for a while, including a walk down a street that is elevated above the city and I’m looking down at a Violent Femmes concert that must have six million people in attendance, but that would seem to be neither here nor there in context of the dream.
Eventually, night falls, and I end up in this nice big building where there’s a black-tie dinner taking place and suddenly there’s this big explosion and all the glass windows get blown out and there’s total chaos. I start trying to escape the building and end up ducking into a room with some girl, who might have been a kitchen worker or a waitress or something. Baum-chicka-baum-baum…
No, just kidding, which is kind of the odd part really. The girl is the clearest part of the dream to me, yet she’s not anyone I have ever met (at least that I consciously remember) and she wasn’t particularly special in any way that I recall. She was rather plain looking actually. Not unattractive, but not a looker or anything, yet she really stood out in the dream and even after I woke up from it. I don’t recall a lot of the specifics, but we basically tried a variety of routes to get out of a burning building while avoiding all the flames as well as some bad guys who presumably blew the building up, and incidentally, were somehow involved with the guy who mugged me and the guys he was meeting with when I made my escape. So it sorta had a chivarly element in that I stumbled upon her and was trying to lead her to safety, but there was also some kind of obvious connection. That was established both by the fact that I was drawn to her and helping her in a building that contained lots of other people running and trying to escape that I didn’t really notice and some of that underlying dream stuff where it’s possible to just “know” things.
The mugging and bad guys blowing up a building are probably easily explained by the fact that my country’s leader and his political party preach fear in hopes of keeping the people of this nation submissive to his rule and blind to their recent and mounting losses to their civil liberties. It’s only natural that on the eve of an election that could easily see him re-elected that the horror of living and raising my children in a society without basic civil rights and one in which terrorist attacks are a reality would manifest itself in my dreams. But it’s the girl I can’t explain. Greg, didn’t your dad used to meet women in his dreams and establish actual relationships with them? I’ll write most of that off to the heavy intake of controlled substances, but it felt kind of bizarre and important in my dream and I don’t know what to make of that aspect of it, if anything. Anyone have similar dreams, or arm-chair shrink analysis?
I am not sure what to make of your dream. I first read your post in between running SQL scripts, and felt that I didn’t have the time to give your dream proper consideration before replying. Reading your post again, I can’t say that I have any more insight. Your dream = situation normal, all effed up. As I mentioned before, dreams and dreaming are hard.
When I have vivid dreams, I am sucked in completely, and sometimes awaken mentally, and thus, physically drained. Certain pieces stick with me. For reasons unknown, I still can remember dreams I had involving a potato called Mechanic. Some weird, wooden, paint-peeling marionettes occasionally resurface, sometimes I can remember crawling underneath a rug only to emerge in some kind of swamp or bayou with some dilapadated shacks and Rastafarian type farmers/peasants. It has been a long time, but I used to consistently dream about canoing inside of flooded building, lost, but without urgency.
I used to try to remember my dreams to see if I could detect a pattern. In short order I abandoned the practice before it could take hold as habit. I will say again, dreams and dreaming is hard. It is tiring work, and revisiting it by attempting to interpret and disect is no treat, either. Since the pattern I was trying to decipher was pretty consistently whacked out, it quickly got old. The novelty was fun at first, but eventually, I just had to say “What in the world is going on? What could that possibly mean? How could that mean anything?”
With minimal effort, I could easily believe that our dreams connect us to something. Something big maybe, a universal peer-to-peer mental network double filtered by Alice with her Looking Glass. Perhaps dreams are our connection, not to something bigger, but maybe something smaller- the little soul that sees too much or maybe sees too little through its keyhole and extrapolates the rest, leading to everything that can make dreams delightful and terrible by turn.
But again, listening to dreams, listening to my dreams, at least, is tiring and difficult. I sometimes think that I hear my dreams like a dog hears a person speak. The communication is sometimes crytstal clear, and sometimes the words are unclear but the tone is decisive, and sometimes it is like the adults speaking in a Charlie Brown TV special. It is that mumbling incoherent rattle that makes it so easy to believe that perhaps there wasn’t any commincation at all, but merely freak coincidence or maybe simple statistical happenstance, 10, 000 etheral monkeys typing on 10,000 synaptic typewriters.
It is when the dreams are unclear or littered with rubbish from the day that I think that it could all be garbage, so much useless churnings of an idling mental engine. I realize now that I haven’t thought about any of my dreams now for months. I will try to set my daytime mind to recall what happens when it wanders.
In Love But Not At Peace, Dar Williams
Ah yes, Mechanic The Potato. I remember the tales clearly. As I recall, you dispatched Mechanic once and for all.
I agree that dreams are a tough nut to crack, and I also get the feeling that they mean something, yet they mean nothing at all so it’s kind of an exercise in futility. It’s still an interesting subject and I’d devour a few thousand pages of Carl Jung if I thought it would get me anywhere. It might even be that they mean nothing at all, but how we react to them or interpret them means something, if you catch my drift. As though they are just a canvas for self-reflection and it is the process of thinking about them that is worthwhile.
My dream activity seems to come in cycles too. I’ll go through phases where I don’t dream much at all and the other times I’ll go for months and have all kinds of vivid dreams. During those periods I usually have a lot of dreams with fantastic vista where I’m roaming around places like the one on the cover of Echo and the Bunnymen’s “Porcupine.” I think I have more disturbing dreams if I have caffeine in my system too. That’s just a theory though.
I think I agree with Tom’s comment that dreams “are just a canvas for self-reflection and it is the process of thinking about them that is worthwhile.” I think it is your mind trying to work out the kinks of your daily thinking in new and roundabout ways. I certainly don’t subscribe to any theory that the dream world goes beyond the physical body and connects with some external spiritual source of any kind.
My dad would not have said that those were “dreams” in which he was communing with other people outside his body. He would say that he was wide awake and consciously chose to get up and leave his body and go meet these other people. There is one story in particular of meeting some woman he didn’t know and exchanging phone numbers with her (while out of body). And I think he alleges that she called him one day for a phone conversation that lasted a few seconds and basically consisted of, “I just wanted to make sure that was real. I was pretty sure it was. Well, I guess that’s all.” I am not 100% sure he claims that’s true, and there’s only that one incident that he spoke of to me in great detail, and he didn’t do it with her, even in his out of body state. They just sat at her kitchen table and talked.
If there’s anything beyond random mental video games going on in dreaming, I think it’s most likely that you are unconsciously taking in information in your waking life which never gets a chance to be processed until you’re in a dream state and that, in that way, you might be able to have insights of some kinds in your dreams which apply to your waking life. But even that logic I would apply cautiously. I think if these little things were so important we’d likely catch onto them in our waking life sooner or later.
That all being said, I can’t say that I have a lot of insight into Tom’s dreams. Hooking up with chics in dreams is a great way of escaping the humdrum of daily life. Sometimes the most memorable kind of hookup is not just doing it with some hot chic, but may actually be more memorable or more rewarding if it never actually gets consummated, if it is somehow tied to a heroic plotline or the forbidden or the bizarre. And sometimes average looking chics are easier to fantasize about because they’re less intimidating or the prospects of hooking up with them are more realistic, and so your mind sort of resonates to the idea of hooking up with all the average chics you come across on a daily basis.
Now, with THAT all being said, I will now confess that I tend to dream of either nothing at all or of doin’ it with hot chics. I love dreaming of doin’ it with hot chics. I can sit around all week thinking about dreams I’ve had of doin’ it with hot chics. Or sometimes with only decent-looking chics but ones that I actually know and so are enhanced by the added realism. I have dreams from years ago about doin’ it with chics that I can remember clear as a bell today. I have very, very few, if any, dreams, that I can recall that don’t involve doin’ it with chics. Not that I haven’t had non-sexual dreams in my life, but they don’t mean a whole lot to me. It’s the doin’ it ones that stick with me. If I could pay money to control my dreams and pick out the chics I’d do it with and how I’d do it, I would be a poor man today. Then again, it’s nice having them randomly picked out for you and being pleasantly surprised by who shows up in your dreams to do it with you. Ahh, to all the girls I’ve loved before… who’ve traveled in and out my dream door… I’m glad you came along. Good times, man, good times.
I admit that it makes me feel like maybe I’m shallow to have such an uncomplicated dream life. As for when I dream, it tends to be the rare occasions when I actually get more than one good night’s sleep in a row. I don’t think it’s much more difficult to determine than that. Maybe I should go out of my way to get more sleep and I’d find myself getting more “virtual” action.