Tag: dream meanings

The Flowing Dream

Posting a great deal today, I know. I blame the dream. 

Last night’s dreamisode had me spilling out out of myself. See, I was me, and the hairy flesh-colored white male that I am, except I spilled out like mercury, flowing over sidewalks and streets, splashing around buildings, plants, and fire hydrants.

I’d been walking through a warm, sunny day in downtown Ashland when this began. I didn’t understand what was happening at first, and then, I panicked, because, oh my God, I’m all over the place. I worried about people walking on me, or having my liquid flesh clogging the sewer drains and drowning others. In a fit of Lucille Ball-like comedy, I scrambled to collect myself and return my mercury-ness to my corporal existence, scooping up handfuls of myself and shoving it into my shirt and jeans. But I couldn’t hold onto myself. It just flowed through my fingers. As my efforts to collect myself wasn’t working, I just let it flow.

Then I was sitting, trying to understand what was happening. Settling back, I watched me flow across the land. My body, like went around others, but didn’t kill them. They embraced it with surprise. As I sat on a chair by a table on a patio and watched myself flowing out, I saw that there was more, that I wasn’t everyone, that I was spreading, but I was still there. I wondered, how far do I go?

With more astonishment, I saw that where I flowed, other things grew and flourished. I wasn’t killing anything at all. Whether the light had changed or my vision was clearer, the day seemed brighter. As I watched, I realized that I was growing even as I sat. From where I sat, I began to see over trees and houses. Soon I saw across the valley and then over the mountains, to the beach and the sea.

Then, in a part that brought tears to my eyes in the dream, the sun was rising wherever I looked. Even as I thought, that’s not possible, I saw, but, yes, that’s what’s happening.

The dream ended.

***

I’d forgotten the dream until I was walking and thinking about my character, Anders, and who he was. In a flash I remembered the dream. I was walking in Ashland, and for a startling moment, I felt like I was in the dream, and experienced this bizarre sense of duality. As that passed, I sharply aligned with Anders and who he was. A black teenager in America, I was trying to get a handle on him, but then saw that I was tagging him through the prisms of my experiences.

He, though, doesn’t think like us, not because of his skin color, but because of his generation. His parents are black, and he loves and respects them, but their experiences don’t shape him. To him, that’s an old way of being. The new way is to shape himself. He eschews and shuns much of popular culture because of that because popular culture attempts to normalize him and push him to conform to a popular conception of who he should be, what he should buy, and how he should behave. Anders rejects and resists that.

As I explored him and his friends, I saw all of this, and how it applied to them. We have stereotypes of our segments of culture and society, from the one percent down to the homeless, from the self-proclaimed Greatest Generation through the Boomers and the rest. Anders and his friends are resisting being called a generation. They’re seeing and seeking fragmentation, breaking old norms and behavior. They don’t want to build something new; they just want freedom to find for themselves if there’s something new out there. 

They think there is something new. They can’t see it, but they’re looking through other’s eyes. It’s not until they can find their own way of seeing that they’ll discover their own country.

***

After all of that, it was a powerful and liberating day of writing like crazy. I know that it’s silly, but I felt privileged and flattered to have experience that dream, because it felt so empowering. I felt special, humbled, and amazed as I wrote.

The session is over. Time to go on to other things.

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Today’s Dream Summaries

More intense dream sequences…more fierce writing: arc and story evolution, plot twists and character development.

The dreams…oh, boy. It seems like there were five or six of them last night. Some military elements were included, of course, because I always do dream of my military structures, jobs, situations and relationships, and some of the start-up world of my life was plugged in. Then, a strange blending of the two emerged. Records were confused from a start-up. People sought help and information. I was trying to look up information and striving to remember, what happened when, so I could provide them guidance.

I reached a pivot point. From nowhere, a very, very erotic dream that involved travel and business. My boss, a woman, and not someone real from my life, flirted with me. She was sharply drawn. I realized she wanted me. I wanted her. A game of seduction was launched. But business interrupted. Two other co-workers, male and female, showed up in the office and sat down. We needed to go on a trip now.  As we raced to organize and leave, my cousin appeared. He was a BFF in my youth. Living not far away and in the same school and the same grade, he was my most ready adventure companion. I haven’t thought of him in years.

Yet, here he was, hastening to help us leave by getting in my car to drive it off and raising my ire because my stuff was still in it. Grrrr. So what does it mean? The eternal question for my dreams. Another friend from my military days, a man also not considered for years, also made his appearance, but in the start-up world…but in his flight suit. Odd. What does it mean?

Then a third military member sought me out, asking for my advice. After we found an empty room and closed the door, he told me of a problem with his son. I wasn’t certain what he needed in return.

But…writing is part of my thinking process. I write to understand. As I write about these dreams, I realize, ah-hah, I’ve been looking at this wrong. I am not being given secret messages or answers to problems or anything; I am exploring my inner lands. I’m trying to see what’s in there. Looking at it from that perspective unfolded new insights and realizations.

More thinking (and writing) is required. This realization is like a plot twist that springs up as rumination is done about what to do, what happens next? The realization feels right: this is where I need to go. Now I need to develop the connections between this epiphany and…well, everything else between here and there. But it is exciting.

And cool.

 

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178

One seven eight may be my new favorite number. This is a fickle thing so, maybe not. I’ll test it.

Five was my favorite number for the longest time. The problem with five is that it’s a simple prime number, and just one digit. Nothing to add. No other ways of looking at it. I do appreciate and respect that it shows up EVERYWHERE – five toes, five fingers, the Fab Five, five rings, five senses, you can create the list. Five has served me well.

But 178, that’s a number you can play with. First, 1 + 7 = 8. Isn’t that cool? Then 1 + 7 + 8 = 16; 1 + 6 = 7. Neat, right? Or is it just me?

It could be just me. I dreamed of 178 last night, part of a long, rambling dream (like this post, but in color) about delivering a wheeled case for an old man. He was in charge of a place and was wheeling it along, but he was old and the black case was large, and I was there and bored, so I offered to help him. He made some snarky retort and then told me to take it to 178.

Off I went, through a door. I picked up my wife as an assistant, but once through that door, we discovered we were in an airport. Announcements were echoing, people rushing along, as they do in airports during peak travel hours. The place was gray cement and full of ramps, so the sound traveled unabated. White signs with numbers in red were overhead. Where was 178? My wife took off, thinking she knew the way, but I went in a different direction.

Arriving at 178 shortly, essentially an alcove, I found an old white refrigerator. Somehow, I knew I was to unpack the black case. Opening the refrigerator, I found it loaded with cheese. Cheese wheels, sticks, slices. White, yellow, blue. Opening the case to unload it, I discovered more yellow cheese, sliced, in packages. Insufficient room was in the frig for the new cheese, so I re-arranged the cheese to make room and add the new cheese.

“Cheese,” I was telling myself in the dream. “What’s with all the cheese?” I was baffled.

Finishing that and looking around, I realized that I was in someplace from my military career. And somewhere around there had been a locker where I’d kept personal items and military gear. I just needed to find it. It was locker 178.

I walked around, orienting myself and searching, moving through a maze of military green and gray doors and walls, past military members, along cinder block walls with exposed pipes. As I went and remembered, I told myself I was close. It had been locked, I remembered — but I had the key. Yes, the small key remained on my key chain.

It was my real and current key chain, just the house and mail key, but now with the key to to lock to my old storage locker (a locker that never actually existed, except in other dreams).

I finally located where the locker used to be, but guess what? It was gone, replaced by a Base Exchange facility where new uniform clothes were racked. No sign of me or my life there existed.

I looked up 178 this morning, and found that when it’s reduced to 7, it’s a mystical number, the number of cycles, of beginning again.

Yes, I had begun again, a new life, life after the military, life after Silicon Valley start-ups, life after IBM. And I’d been feeling that sense of renewal the last several days, like a song playing through my head, or a lingering perfume after a tight embrace.

I like that, although my explanation for the cheese is rather lame: the cheese represents food for thought.

Yeah.

Don’t know if that’s true. But one good thing I take from it all is that I didn’t wake up a zombie. That has to count for something.

Of course, thinking of that, I immediately begin conceptualizing a story about people who are zombies in their dream – and what happens in their real life.

Time to write like crazy, at least one more time.

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