Tag: Dreams

Dreams of Ineptness

What a night of dreams. Given scales of one to ten, where ten is the highest, these dreams were around eights on the vividness and intensity scales. They left me feeling emotionally, mentally and physically exhausted. Dreams of these types trigger speculation that I’m living in the dreams, and the dreams are the reality. So while I’ve been here, living with all of its entanglements and needs, I’ve actually been asleep there. Once I awaken there, I experience that life through my dreams.

Makes sense. In the dreams, I was bewildered about what was going on and expectations for me. Everyone liked me. Nobody was concerned about me. I was just there, part of the landscape. It was an incoherent landscape. Some others and I were in the back interior of a giant parked 1982 Camaro. It was so large, we were standing and moving around without being encumbered. Things were sometimes written on the car’s immense rear hatch window. But I knew I wasn’t doing what I was supposed to be doing. Fueled by guilt, anxiety burned through me. I was going to be found out at any moment. 

Leaving the Camaro, I raced around in a covert frenzy, attempting to cover my tracks and do what I was supposed to be doing all along. The office made no sense. Everything had been moved outside. Meanwhile, new instructions were being introduced. I struggled to stay abreast of the new ideas. I was supposed to be understanding this stuff, using it and explaining it to others. I had little idea of what was going on.

I sought out the people in charge and the files. The files were supposed to be locked up. I didn’t know the combination. One of those in charge confessed to me that the locks didn’t work. They were a facade. She laughed as she explained this. As I tried catching up on my tasks and correct everything, I began learning through intimate encounters with others, nobody else knew what was going on. It was chaos with a veneer of normalcy and knowledge. Nobody else was doing it correctly. Most barely understood what I talked about and laughed when I mentioned it. A series of giggling confessions were shared with me to that end.

Understanding that I wasn’t going to be discovered because I was an inept fraud, I began relaxing. My errors and shortcomings weren’t going to be discovered because everyone else had shortcomings and were making errors. None of them cared about it.

Writing about them, I chortle with insight. Ah, yes, the classic dreams of inadequacy and our latent, perpetual fears of being exposed as a fraud. Do writers ever experience anything like this? I suppose not. Most writers are powerhouses of security and self-confidence.

I should just move on. I would, but I feel too tired. I need to sleep to recover from my dreams.

Now there’s a metaphor if I’ve ever read one.

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A Turn Into the Weird

Once again, my dreams took a hard turn into the weird. The one dominates my waking thinking.

There are six lanes of highway. I’m overlooking them with friends. One of these friends is Randy Moore. Randy and I served twenty years in the U.S.A.F. and were together at Onizuka Air Station, Sunnyvale, CA, in the early 1990s. He passed away from colon cancer the month of his sixtieth birthday.

He was alive and the Randy I knew in my dream. The six lanes of traffic have five ‘support lanes’. That’s the only way I can explain it. It’s a fast highway. But, while studying it, Randy and I (and others) realize there’s a huge gap in the road. Basically, it ends in a black chasm.

Then we realize we’re in an enormous cave. Then, we find, oh, wait, the highway continues on the other side of this chasm. The catch is, that’s several hundred yards away. That’s a helluva catch.

So we’re chatting, what a weird design, is it by design, what else could have caused this, and end by saying, “We should stop cars coming down because they can’t make it.” But we were also noting, “They see it. They’re stopping.”

But the driver of an old van guns his engine. Tires screaming, smoke billows out and the vehicle launches down the road into the dark sky. “He’s trying for it,” either Randy or I say.

“He’s not going to make it,” one of us say.

“Oh, wait…maybe it will.”

The van flies through the air like a scene from ‘The A-Team’. We watch.

“He’s not going to make it,” I declare. As I make the statement, a red Ferrari screams past.

“What the hell is he doing?” Randy asks.

I’m amused and appalled. “He’s trying to save the van.”

The Ferrari catches the van as both land on the other side. They bounce and skew sideways before slamming into the cavern wall in a ball of flame.

Randy and I begin wandering the cavern lanes. Examining the structure, we wonder, how will we ever get to the other side.

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Up My Game

In what I must consider one of my strangest dreams ever, I dreamed I was a running back in the NFL.

It was the off-season, and we – running backs – were being tested. I didn’t know this, though. The whole thing was unfolding in the dream.

I was approached by a man in athletic gear. Holding a stopwatch and clipboard, he asked me to run a course. I didn’t know who he was or why.

The course was in a high school slash…ummm…hotel. I was to run the course through the halls.

It was a funny request to me. I was in my late teens in the dream. “Okay.” Shrug. It seemed strange, but what the hell.

Only after I ran it did I begin to realize that it was a test. Players, coaches, owners and sports announcers were staying in the high school slash hotel. Then I realized the test was about rating NFL running backs. With that, I experienced memories of being in NFL games. I didn’t have many touches but I had a high yards per touch score. Watching film in my head, I saw how I could improve.

Eventually, hanging around and talking with different people, I confirmed that I was an NFL running back and we were being rated from one to thirty-two. I was eight rankings from the bottom. Doing some dream math, I determined that meant I was twenty-fourth. Not a great score, but hey, I was an NFL player with no idea how he achieved that.

I immediately began visualizing how I could improve my rating by upping my game, how to better protect the quarter then cut into the flat as another passing option. I saw how I could change the way I see the field, watch for blocks, be more patient and cut more explosively. I was dismayed that I was only five foot eight and one hundred and forty pounds but determined I could gain weight.

Then I spilled a glass of water on a carpet in a room in the dream, and the dream ended.

The glass had been half full.

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Dance, Dance, Dance

Succinct dreams remembered.

I was in the military once again, USAF, wearing my light blue shirt with its salad, dark blue pants, working in the command post. I’m in my mid-thirties.

I’ve acquired an additional duty. Every day at noon, someone comes in and relieves me so I can teach others to dance. I teach two to three people at a time.  don’t know them. They learn their steps and moves quickly. Once they learn, they disappear and others replace them. It’s important to the dream me that the students get in and out quickly, because I’m teaching them to dance to reduce tension and conflict.

The dream logic puzzles the dream me, who points out that I can’t dance in real life. Oddly, I’m not actually dancing in the dream, either; I just offered music and told them to dance. They would dance, laugh, and disappear. I was pleased with the assignment.

The song in the dream was Justin Timberlake’s ‘Can’t Stop the Feeling, from ‘Trolls’. 

The second dream was as succinct. Living on some land I’d fixed up, I was now feeding the cats. I measured out food into bowls and then go find the cats and give them the food.

Then I awoke and fed the cats.

 

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Coming Clean

Cleaning

To dream that you are cleaning indicates your ability to make situations more positive and to solve pressing problems. You are learning how to replace pessimistic views and beliefs with those that are more uplifting and pleasurable. This can suggest your desire to seek inner peace and enlightenment.

To dream that you are cleaning an object means that you want to improve a certain part of your personality or character. If you are cleaning the refrigerator or oven, then it implies that you want to tackle an issue head on rather than trying to solve it gradually. Perhaps you feel as if you have reached a stagnant position in your life and you are unsure of where to go from there.

To dream that you are cleaning out a desk implies that you have decided to shed unfavorable pressures and instead follow a new path. You now comprehend the fact that you have options and choices to make; you are not stuck in the same rut.

h/t to dreamforth.

I dreamed I was cleaning last night. Once again I was returned to military life, where I enjoyed the structure. Expectations were clear and you were rewarded for doing an outstanding job. I liked that.

In this dream, I was rushing to get dressed in the military. Part of a large building, I hurried to find my gear and then to a shower to clean and shave. Finding one, a person of lessor rank, someone who I knew, confronted me and told me I had to clean the shower.

I was outraged. Number one, why should I need to do that, now, without expectations established? Number two, who was this person of lower rank to tell me that I was clean this shower? Why not one of the many other people milling around there?

I was furious. Nothing like the wrath of an experienced senior NCO. We knew how to do angry and focus it like lasers.

I did so in my dream. Everyone shrank away, the cleaning supplies left behind. This pissed me off, too. Feeling it needed to be done, angry that others had shirked their duties, I began cleaning. Unfortunately, as I cleaned, I saw how filthy it was. I was resigned; I was cleaning it, so personal ethics insisted I do an outstanding job.

So I cleaned and cleaned, scrubbing away mold and soap scum. Then, I found something that belonged to me. Oh, was I surprised. With more cleaning, I found more of my materials there. I then began to see that the person who confronted me was trying to explain it was my doing, something I refused to accept and understand. Instead of trying to understand, I was brow-beating them with rank.

On waking and thinking about the dream, I realized that this was another recurring dream. I have dreams about being in the military, but I also have specifically oriented dreams about those periods. Cleaning a common room, like the shower, was one such dream.

The question, why do I continue to dream about cleaning in the military, led me to dreamforth. Is it correct? I don’t know. I was surprised to awaken in a surly, low-energy, blackheart mood. Considering that cleaning in dreams might be a way of trying to tell myself that I needed to seek new balance or improve was my dream entity’s way of trying to help me cope.

 

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The Strike

Wild as tornadoes,

flashy as lightning,

wondrous as magic and technology,

the Moon and the Grand Canyon,

the Great Wall and Angel Falls,

majestic as rolling ocean swells,

enigmatic as love and death,

dreams strike,

jolting you into confusion and fear,

surprise and excitement,

and contemplation and searching.

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One, Two, Three

Of the three dreams remembered from last night, the third was the most striking.

The first was of the usual military variety. Back on active duty, I’m to attend a planned changing of the guard ceremony, except I don’t have my ribbons and medals, and my uniform isn’t pressed. They specifically told us three days before that our uniforms needed to be pressed. Why didn’t I go out right away and have that done, I kept asking myself. There were others in the same situation. They asked the same question. Meanwhile, many people were rallying around us, trying to help us.

But I was distracted. There had been a death of someone close to me the Friday before. I don’t often dream of death, and my dream being struggled to cope with it.

The second dream was of the usual visual gibberish involving rising water. Streams, lakes, rivers, everywhere I went, I encountered rising brown water. While the images remind me this week of the scenes from I-5 flooding in Redding, the Oroville Dam situation, and other flood scenes in the news, the dream events didn’t disturb me. I always ‘knew’ I was protected but I worried about others. This is a variation of a regular dream that I’ve had for decades. I used some of the dream memories in ‘Everything in Black & White,’ a novel I wrote a few years ago but haven’t published. The hero encountered flooding and ended up encountering, fighting and saving other survivors. These were the first people he’d seen since the Great Collapse.

The third dream was something new and different for me. I was busy writing. Writing, writing, writing. I was writing on everything I could find. I was possessed to write.

The neighborhood residents were all helping me. They knew I was a writer and knew I was writing, but didn’t know what I was writing. But individuals would come to me with more scraps of paper, pens and notebooks to use so I could write. They fed me so I could write, and kept unobtrusively trying to keep me comfortable as I wrote. I lived in a large apartment with my family. We had several cats. A canal was outside of my apartment. People lived across the way, including a family from India. They were most watchful and helpful to me although I sensed they were poor and struggling.

They had two cats who had been injured. I took the cats in, fixed them up with robot exo-skeletons and nursed them to good health. One cat immediately rushed back to its people. I could see them receive it. The two children were very happy, and the mother knew I’d helped. A whole confused segment followed about their yard and improvements they made along the bank. My wife and I would stroll each day, see the changes, and discuss doing something similar.

But the second cat had disappeared. I was busy writing but found the cat living in my house. He’d grown to a very large size and had mastered walking upright. He rushed out of the house. I worried about where he was going and what would happen to him, so I followed.

All this time, I’m writing. I’m writing as I do everything. I stroll and write. I find a piece of paper and write. I follow the cat and write. I see the cat has made it home yet I feel compelled to go over and tell the people that the cat had been with me and safe. Before I can do that, the husband visits me. Young, he’s barefoot and very intelligent. His aura of calm intelligence awes me.

I’m sitting at a table writing. He gets on the table top to speak with me. He’s wearing gray sweat pants and a white tee shirt. It’s all so clean, it looks new. Lying on his side, he curls up and talks to me, smiling as he does. He challenges me with questions and challenges my answers with questions and observations. I don’t remember those details but as we’re talking, I’m writing. We talk for a while as I write but something happens and interrupts our visit. He leaves for his house across the canal.

After some thought, I decide to follow. The canal water has become much higher. It’s a narrow canal. I think about leaping it. I have new shoes on, though. A female friend present said, “I hope you’re not thinking about jumping that canal,” which is exactly what I’m thinking. She then keeps trying to convince me not to make the jump.

I don’t attempt the jump but instead attempt to cross via rocks. I misjudge the distances and end up in deeper water with my new shoes. But it’s all good.

I enter the people’s home. They’re busy in the back with the returned cat. I can hear that the children are very pleased. I’m an intruder and prepare to leave without fulfilling my mission of telling them what had happened with the cat. But I’m writing. And there is a typewriter. It’s  an old manual portable. I sit down and begin typing on it. I can’t help myself.

The young mother comes out. I apologize for using her typewriter and being there without permission. She dismisses my apology. I begin explaining who I am and why I’m there. She dismisses my explanation, telling me with a gentle smile, she knows who I am, and it’s fine. She offers food. I decline and state that I must leave. But she has made up the guest bed for me with soft downy blankets and sheets. No, I insist on leaving. “Then I must put the bedding back away,” she replies in a flirtatious manner, “after all this work that I’ve done.” “I’ll help,” I answer. She tells me that it’s not necessary but I pick up and fold a blanket.

But then I must write. Sitting down at the typewriter, I start typing.

The end.

 

 

 

 

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Options

I dreamed of a swarthy man with drooping dark eyes.

Coal black hair was parted down the middle and cinched into a pony-tail. A trim black beard underlined his lean face. He was well dressed in a clean, modern style, with collared, starched Oxford shirt open at the neck and a simple, unbuttoned vest. He also wore a Bluetooth and was using it to converse with his staff.

He and I met in a cool, softly lit room. Without further prelude, I found him asking me what I wanted. Without being aware that I’d told him, he told his staff what I wanted, and I corrected him. As this was going on, he held out a pale green dinner plate. The plate was plain. On it was a small white piece of paper folded in half.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Your choices,” he replied, then spoke to his people via the Bluetooth.

I picked up the paper and unfolded it. It was blank. I asked, “Is this a joke?”

“No. Words would limit you. Everything is your option.”

A short, white woman wearing a bright red dress entered. She glanced at me and then focused on the black-haired man. “She seeks help, too,” he said.

He began speaking to her. Turning away, I saw several white pub tables set up around the room. Gold coins and red rose petals were strewn and mounded on the tables.

“Help yourself,” the man said.

A white canvas bag was in my hand. I slide some gold and petals into the bag. He urged me to take more. I declined, adding, “I want to leave some for others.” Yet, I saw that whatever I had taken was already being replenished. Like mounds were appearing on other tables. People were entering and filling their backs.

The black-haired man shook his head. “There’s enough for others. There are no limits. It’s infinite.”

Taking my bag, I drifted out of the room and told myself, “I need to remember this.”

Someone unseen replied, “You will.”

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Dream-Peat

I dreamed three dreams last night. There were repeats of dreams I’ve dreamed before. Like watching a movie more often, more details have developed, or are noticed and retained.

The dreams involve me to different degrees. I’m heavily involved in the first dream, less involved in the second one, and I’m almost phased out wholly by the third. The third dream is mostly about black women getting on an aircraft. The aircraft is a C-5 Galaxy. They’re happy and excited about a journey they’re about to take. I’m happy and excited for them, too, but most of my involvement is listening to them and seeing close-up shots of all those happy people going on a journey.

The first one, that so involved me, was mostly adventure. About me and a group escaping, and then exploring, the dream begins after the escape. I don’t know what we’re escaping. The group is small. We find a cold, icy place to stay until we’re rescued. Once we’re in that place, we discover there are items left behind, and that we’re in what was once a military post. Then we learn the post isn’t entirely abandoned. Little by little, we slip in and integrate, making use of things we see the military using. The military isn’t malicious or anything; they’re simply there, going about their business as it’s been on so many military bases I visited.

No family was in the dream. So it goes. I never feel threatened or frightened in the dream. I’m a little wary initially but that changes quickly as I relax and gain confidence. By the end, when I’m using the military’s stuff, part of them but not one of them, I’m a confident leader.

The second dream is a lame sequel to the first, almost like a set-up to the third. There’s abstract discussions about what happened – “We survived, we found this place, now we can help others” – and sort of a montage of things like that being done. Then, it’s on to the third dream.

I write about the dreams to understand them. Frankly, I don’t. They seem hopeful but beyond that, I can sketch any number of meanings to them. All those meetings would have strength, weakness, logic and flaws to my interpretations. I sometimes think I should devote more time to understanding them but I see that as a major investment in time. I like to guard my time and routines.

Which brings me around to my conclusion. Do my dreams need to have significance, meanings, or portends to other matters? Perhaps it’s sufficient to accept, I dreamed. My mind has cleared some clutter from my thinking. Maybe it’s like organizing the attic; “Oh, here we have some leftover stuff. Where should we put it?” “Stick it in a dream.” “Oh, okay.”

It’s odder and a little more intriguing that I have repeat dreams. Do I have some frozen synapses causing the same images, sounds, ideas and stories to circulate through my mind? Such thoughts trigger comparisons to similarities in my writing. I often address time, memory, reality, technology and alienation in my fiction writing, whether it’s the mystery series or the science-fiction novels.

This leads to insights and suspicions. Perhaps I need more outside input and stimulus. I’m in ruts of living and writing, constrained by others’ health issues, concerns and worries, and have been for some time. Perhaps my dreams are a reflection of my ‘real’ situation, and that’s why they’re repeating, and why I’m so little involved. I’m often a spectator within my own life, another rider on the train.

Not too long ago, I read an article about a woman who often fantasizes during the day. Her pattern of thought developed when she was a child but she realized she continued them as an adult, and that they were connected to regular activities. She recognized that when she does certain activities, she likewise engages in fantasies, and they’re often the same or similar fantasies.

Becoming more interested in what she was doing and why, she searched for evidence that others were doing something like this, and found she wasn’t alone in this habit.

Well, I could have told her that; I also do this.

At first, this behavior was helpful in falling asleep. I engage it and knew it as a way to shut off my brain so I could sleep and rest. Later, I extended it and began engaging to turn off my brain from other issues. I’ve always recognized it as a coping practice to de-stress, but they’re also a way to engage my subconscious mind to think, develop solutions and ideas. These fantasies are harmless, about designing survival places, trains or ships, but I can see parallels to my dreams, and to my fiction writing practices.

In a curious way, I begin to view myself as a pie. Then we can slice me up into my various activities and realms – writing, sleeping and dreaming, walking and living, interacting with others. When I begin doing that, I can see how the whole fits together in a larger pattern. I can see my limitations and frustrations, and how they manifest themselves through fiction writing, daytime activity fantasies, and yes, nocturnal dreams. I can see how other dreams were wish-fulfillment that I matter more than I do, that I have a starring role in something, somewhere, that I am not just another blink of consciousness among the trillions of blinks on Earth.

For better or worse, the dreams are part of the whole necessary to complete me. That isn’t a permanent or complete answer, nor even a deep insight. It’s just another glimpse of an entity and a life.

It just happens to be a very personal view.

 

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Glass

My dreams were like glass last night, slick and transparent, and then breaking with sound, jarring me from one direction and composure, launching me into a spin.

I saw myself in different worlds, and viewed myself in different times, leaving me to awaken and wonder, where am I now and where have I been?

My body was rigid. The colors struck me with hurricane force and the sounds were like boulders falling down around me. Stars stared down at me and I stared back. The Sun lit the darkness with a sudden flare, and I saw more, and further, in its blaze. I saw mountains and seas, buildings and cities, volcanoes and swamps, violent red sunsets and cold red mornings where my breath fogged the air into crystallized obscurity. I saw sunshine on ice and moonlight on ink.

But I stood straight and remained myself throughout the changes. And awakening, thinking and contemplating the melting shards of dream, I was pleased that I had that much.

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