Category: Dreams

A Dream of Lost Identity

After twenty years in the military, I suppose it’s not surprising that my identity is linked to my time in the ranks. I’ve been retired for more time — twenty-two years — than I served — twenty-one years — so my continuing dreams about identity and being in the military disturb me.

In this latest one, storms were raging. I was the new MFWIC – mo-fo who’s in charge — and was geared up and entering a tense situation. Everyone was waiting for me. But arriving there, I discovered I lacked my military identification card. I knew I’d forgotten it. That embarrassed me. I fumed about the loss without saying anything, but none dared approach me, as all were aware of the situation. All I could so, though, was stew with frustration while waiting to go back and get a new ID.

Returning to the staging location, I didn’t need to say a word. Nobody else did, either. Everyone was waiting for me to get there. As soon as I did, a young female airman in old BDUs wordlessly went about providing me a new ID card. Once she did that, I turned to leave and begin again, more than ready to do so.

And the dream ended.

0

Dream Conference

I dreamed I was at a conference and on a panel with John Scalzi and one other writer. The discussion was about the future. The panel ended as the dream began.

Next, with my wife beside me, I was playing a giant video game. There were three huge screens, the size of something in a stadium, but they were the old “green screens.” People wanted to see me play this game because I was reputed to be very good at it. I wanted to play because I could win prizes. But, it quickly became apparent that the controller was malfunctioning. As I realized that, I laughed at the situation, surrendering to the inevitable, and the disappointed spectators drifted away.

It was time to go home, and we were at an enormous airport. I suspect it may have been LAX.  I was talking with the third writer on the panel when Scalzi came by. We engaged in a conversation about what to eat. Scalzi wanted ham with raisin sauce. Then he had to catch his flight and said his good-byes. Next, my wife had to catch her flight, so we said good-byes, and she headed for her flight. The other writer and I began walking to our terminal. He made some excuse about going off and doing something. I responded that I’d wait for him.

He told me that he’d rather I didn’t. “No offense,” he said, “but the visions you and Scalzi are just too dark for me. I want to believe in something more hopeful and positive.” Then he waved and walked away, leaving me stunned, and reflecting on what he said.

 

3

Dream Mountain

It was, at once, the most innocuous and the most affecting dream I’ve recently had.

I dreamed it was a cool predawn day. I was climbing a mountain. I don’t know what mountain. I went alone.  Wearing the hiking boots and shorts that I often wore back in the early nineteen nineties, I mostly walked, but sometimes I had to crawl, or pull myself up. Sparse, large pine trees were sometimes encountered, and the wind sometimes blew, but it was silent.

The sun was rising. I grew hot and sweaty as I climbed, sometimes pausing to rest and look around. I don’t know why I climbed, but I reached the peak at sunrise, and stood, looking around. The wind blew more sharply. The rising sun illuminated some storm clouds to the east, and was warm on my face, while I saw the final stars of night to the west. Now what, I wondered.

When I awoke, I felt like I’d been crying. It wasn’t relief, pain, happiness or sorrow. The tears felt more like…tension.

Like I’d been expecting something else, and still waited.

0

Dreams of Saving Babies

Oddly, I enjoyed two variations of the same dream last night.

Each began with me driving a car. In the first, a man, who I think was Latino, began shouting and waving. Looking back, I saw a baby stroller with a child in it racing down the highway toward me. Changing speed and course, I dropped back until the stroller caught up with me, matched speed, and snagged the stroller handle through the window. After bringing us both to a stop, I put my hazard lights on and began waving at the oncoming traffic in warning while I awaited the parents(s).

In the next part of the dream, I saved a child again. This time, I was walking with friends through a plaza, when a child fell out of a window. Seeing what was happening, I managed to catch the child and return her unharmed to her mother. I then remarked to my friends, “That’s the second child I saved today.” They tried convincing me it was a dream as I told them, “No, it was real.”

Then, as the second feature on this dream night, I was walking through a department store. I was wearing brown leather sandals, but somehow misplaced them. Most of the rest of the dream was about looking for the sandals, explaining to others that I’d lost them and what they looked like, and looking at other sandals to see if they might be mine.

I then returned to saving babies. Again, I was driving. A child in an unattended stroller rolled toward traffic. Seeing it, I maneuvered my car to protect the stroller from other cars and then herd it to a stop. Then, I was walking with friends through a plaza when I saw a child about to plummet over the edge of walkway. Racing over, I caught her before she fell. After returning the child to her grateful mother, I told my friends, “That’s the fourth child I’ve saved today.” As they protested that I’d dreamed it, I realized it was true; I’d twice dreamed I’d saved two children.

And then, I awoke.

2

Dreams of Dishes, Numbers and Highways

Dreamed of doing the dishes last night, along with being on a highway and trying to help others find their destination, and having a pair of fours and eights.

In the dishes dream, I was washing fine china in a gray plastic tub. The china had a pretty, delicate pink flower motif on them. The water in the tub was clean, warm and soapy. Filled to the brim, it was outside. There was a bit of crud on the china, so I was using a nylon pad to try to scrub them clean. That wasn’t working, so I went for a walk to find a better solution. While doing that, I eavesdropped on young people around the neighborhood. I became confused when a young woman called her dog, because his name was Michael, which is my name. Why is she calling me? We had a good laugh over it.

The highway dream featured a heavily traveled highway. I was in an open-air car, as most of us were. Small, the cars weren’t important and were barely noticed in the dream. I heard some others talking behind me. Realizing that they sought information on different topics and were lost, I understood that I could help them.

The dream became a little strange, then. Traffic started moving. I pulled off at a split where the congested highway headed into the desert. Traffic stopped behind me. As I hurried to explain to the others where to go, I flipped through scenes of information. None of it was technologically advanced. Some, for example, were flip-charts tied together by twine. Barely held together, the scenes came alive whenever I stopped on one. In this way, I tried to help them to the information they needed. But I was wrong about what they needed. One in particular was searching for information on whittling but I’d presented him with information on something else. I also kept getting distracted by other interesting pieces of information I saw. Then I noticed that the highway traffic was backing up. Knowing it was my fault, I apologized to the others and took off, seguing into the third dream.

In this final remembered dream, I was first shuffling cards, then looking at cards, and then being dealt cards. All I know is that I kept discovering that I had a pair of fours and eights. That same combination kept coming up, red fours and black eights, although I don’t recall the suites.

The dreams are enough to keep me wondering for the rest of the day.

0

Today’s Theme Music

Here’s a Friday two-fer.

I’d planned for a celebratory song today but this one dominated one of my dreams last night. “When the Levee Breaks” is an old blues song. I became familiar with it through Led Zeppelin’s cover of it in nineteen seventy-one.

In my dream, it was my wake-up song, playing every day on my radio at seven in the morning. I know this because I was explaining that to other people. I told them, I’d begun doing that in June, so I’d been doing it for a year. During that time, I’d found a new shortcut, I explained. While explaining that, I pointed out a window at a new white concrete highway that was alongside a shoreline. The sky was so blue and the sun was so bright, it awed you into silence. Vehicles were on the road. It looked like typical commuter traffic.

We joked a while about hearing that song everyday. I know it was “When the Levee Breaks” because one other asked, “What is that song?” Then he answered himself as I answered him, “”When the Levee Breaks,” by Led Zeppelin.” He nodded, laughing along as we spoke. He said, “It’s a good song. I don’t know if I’d want to hear it all the time.” I answered, “I only hear it in the morning.” He replied, “Well, even that might be too much, if it’s every day.”

I awoke from that and the other two remembered dreams feeling like a dark cloud had been lifted. You decide, though: will hearing this song every morning be too much?

 

0

A Dream of Reassurance

The dream leaped into chaos. ‘They’ were trying to become organized.

First, we were working in packed offices. All were dressed in dark blue utility uniforms and black jump boots. Men and women were present, but no children, and no elderly. Thirty people were using office space planned for ten people. I was upper middle-management, which afforded me more freedom and space. While the majority worked at two rows of tables, side by side by side, elbows to assholes, my space was in the back. But  the filing cabinets, telephones, and coffee fax machines were at the front. I was required to go forward to get what I needed, and then go back via a narrow row. The two people in charge would often be in that narrow row, talking, planning and consulting, forcing me to wait and fume with impatience.

So I began thinking ahead about other things that I could do. I knew, in the dream, we would be leaving soon. We would not be able to take much. There was something confusing in the dream about carefully cutting our pockets from our shirts to make quasi-gloves to protect our hands, and wearing strange netting as leggings to protect our legs.

The order came to pack up. Confusion and noise levels increased as we, and thousands of others, left our offices and crowded into a marshaling area. I followed all the instructions. Inspectors went through to see how everyone was doing. My activities impressed them, which amused me.

But horror struck me after a while. I realized that I’d done as instructed, and had packed my laptop into my luggage. My God, what a mistake, I thought. I was distraught, believing, people handling the bags will rip me off. I’d never see that computer again, and all my work on it would be lost.

At that point, I began stirring from my sleep, and the dream. As I did, a voice said, “Don’t worry. You’re not going to lose anything. You still have everything you need.”

Just before I left the dream, I was given my wheeled black travel bag. I opened it, and there was my laptop. I awoke, pleased and relieved.

0

Political Dream

The dream was short but intense. Throngs were milling and shopping. Indoors, a warm, festive ambiance dominated. I was with my wife and some friends, going in and out of stores and other places. People, including my wife and our friend, Marty, kept trying to point things out to me or ask me questions, but I was intent and focused, shopping for something for myself that I’d always wanted. I don’t know what that was in the dream, but the dream’s backstory, learned from overheard conversations, was that we were shopping for a new POTUS.

I awoke surprised and pleased.

2

The Dream Brief

I had to face the bald facts.

That’s what I saw in one of my dreams last night.

In it, I was looking at myself in the mirror. There, I discovered that I was balding in an area that I’d not noticed before. Technically, it would have been a deeply receding hairline on the left side of my face.

“I didn’t notice that,” my dream self said, turning my head and examining my hairline.

To which my awareness said, “You need to look in a new direction because you’re missing something that’s going on.”

Isn’t that the way it often is? You’re used to doing something in a fixed way. It becomes rote habit, conducted without thought. They can stale on you, but you can’t see it, because you’re always looking at it the same way.

And by you, I mean, me.

0

So Just

Illness interrupts life, if you’re fortunate. The less fortunate end up in hospital, hospice, or a grave. For me, the latest illness is an interruption to my usual routines.

  • Took a hot shower on day three, first since March 20.
  • Didn’t exercise or walk, achieving less than four thousand steps on each of the the first two days, far below my Fitbit goals.
  • Didn’t post, and barely read anything, until the third day.
  • Didn’t write, edit or revise. Didn’t address any publishing biz.
  • Didn’t do yard work, or go out anywhere, and scarcely kept up with the news.
  • Ate little but soup and buttered toast for the first several days, and drank large quantities of tea and hot water.
  • Binged season four of ‘Justified’ and advanced halfway through season five. No ‘Red Dwarf’ was available streaming. RD has been my sickness staple since the turn of the century. I have some of the DVDs and tapes, but it was easier to stream TV.

Being sick allowed some thinking time. I remembered that I’d dreamed of trying to help a general get to a hospital a few days before my illness, and wonder if I was attempting to warn myself. I dreamed a bunch when I was sick, about broken plumbing, stolen baseball gloves, fake roses, taking charge to organize people and processes, family, and flying.

I dreamed of flying a lot during the illness. It wasn’t like Superman and other superheroes would fly, horizontally, with their arms stuck out in front of them, as though diving, or with my arms swept back like wings. No, my flights were like I was walking through the air. I would step up into the air, find my direction, step toward it and be there.

There was some goofiness. I sang to myself. One of the things I sang was, “You say , “Meow,” and I say “Hello. Hello, hello.” I don’t know why you say meow, I say, “Hello.”” I just kept messing with the Beatles’ song, substituting meow for everything “you say”.

It was a mild illness in the relative spectrum of how these things go. The illness has faded to a harsh cough, a throat that’s sore when I cough, and some mucus. Energy is back up to about eighty-three percent of normal. The sensation I couldn’t get warm is gone, the aches have receded, and clarity has returned to thinking.

So just resume everything.

0

Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑