6 posts tagged “dreams”

Last night was the first night in a very long while that I had trauma dreams about my childhood. I think that I had probably forgotten how absolutely terrified I once was of growing up and becoming an adult. Obviously I'm pretty much over that these days, as I've been an adult for many years now and the world has yet to actually end, but I must still remember exactly what it was like on some unconscious level. 

Dream 1

In the first dream, I was in a redwood forest, getting ready to climb one of those big giant ones you always see documentaries about on the Travel Channel. Cut to me somehow being all the way at the top of the tree without understanding how the hell I got there. I think "oh crap I have to get down from here because this is dangerous" but see that the nearest branch is way too far down for me to actually get to safely. 

This is where I look around at all the other redwoods in the forest and see that each has a person of its own climbing all the way to the top... only they apparently remembered to bring their ropes, pulleys, and climbing gear so they could get around so high up safely without having to worry about falling. I, of course, have no such gear and wonder how I could have been so damned stupid. 

From there, I remember thinking that the only way out of the situation was to choose between starving to death and committing suicide by jumping out of the tree. I also vaguely remember deciding I was going to jump to get the horror over with as quickly as possible.

Dream 2

I was on the beach wading out into the ocean and enjoying the water, which was only about knee deep. After I get out a certain distance, I notice that there are two brown cows swimming in the water and wanting me to play with them. I love cows, so I comply, petting them and splashing around with them in the ocean without a care in the world.

And here is where there's another weird cut to the same situation, only an extended amount of time into the future without me knowing how I got there. I'm still out in the ocean, only I apparently wandered so far out that I can no longer see the shore. The sun has gone down, the cows are gone, and apparently the tide has come in... severely. The water is now up to my shoulders and rising and I don't know how to swim, so this is just as bad as being stuck up in a redwood.

I try to wade toward where I think the shore ought to be, and it turns out someone has closed the ocean... like... for the night or something. There is high, wrought iron fencing cutting off the deep part of the ocean where I am from the shore where it's safe. Needless to say, I again feel panicked because there is no way out of a perilous situation.

I vaguely remember riding my childhood bike to the beach and looking for it on the shore itself, although it's waaaaaaaaaaay past where the iron fencing is. I see it on the beach, only it's rusted, bent, and twisted.... like a bike that's been in the junkyard for years. I remember wondering how that could be since I literally just rode it to the beach earlier that day. 

I again start to panic because I realize I don't remember where I live or how to get there, so even if I manage to escape the situation and find alternate transportation, I will have nowhere to go. At this point, I wake myself up because this was the umpteenth dream of this type that I'd had that night.

So how do I know for sure these were terror dreams about childhood and not just any old anxiety dreams? Because I remember the kind of terror I was feeling all too well, despite the fact that I haven't felt it sincechildhood. It was the exact same terror I used to feel when I was young at times when I would think about how awful I thought it would be to have to grow up and be an adult. It was just this positively overwhelmingcombination of anxiety, terror, and uncertainty. I recognized it right away upon waking from these dreams. I had forgotten it totally in the years since childhood, it would seem.

Oddly enough, I woke up this morning and read that Neptune had gone direct last night, and supposedly dreams about long-buried things that I don't normally think about were a possible result. This would be especially so for me since my Neptune is in my first house, the house of identity. I usually keep track of what's going on with my chart just out of interest, but I don't keep track of it that closely, so I had no idea. (I suppose that could be some of the reason certain things have been on my mind over the past couple of days.)

Typically I avoid thinking about the past a whole lot... at least in that sense. I consciously consider overindulging in nostalgia or spending time stewing about past relationships or past concerns to be an immense waste of time. Even when I have nightmares, they're typically about the future, or else supernatural things that would be totally beyond my control, like demon possessions, or hauntings, or something. 

These were much worse though. They took me back to a time in my life when I felt utterly powerless and overwhelmed in a way I no longer feel as an adult. However, I also feel oddly cleansed this morning -- as if during the night I somehow put down a load I've been carrying for a long time, if that makes any sense. That's not the typical feeling I tend to have after a long cycle of nightmares. I'm not totally certain why these should really be any different.

I've been having the creepiest dreams lately. I don't know what's up, but I personally blame the erratic weather/temperature fluctuations we've been having lately. I'm very sensitive to things like that, and even small changes can affect me profoundly. I doubt it really helps that my body has really never adjusted to Connecticut style weather. It still thinks it's in Northern California.

I've thankfully been able to forget most of the dreams. It seems that as long as I don't actually talk about them out loud or write them down, they usually disappear over the course of the day. However, if one of them sticks a little too well, sometimes it's better to write them down or share. Then I feel a little better.

The one from the night before last was really bad, and although I don't actually remember too much about the dream itself, I do remember shouting myself awake. In the dream, I was back in my old childhood bedroom, and there was a ghost materializing in front of the closet. All I could see of the ghost was a trenchcoat and a fedora, but it was becoming increasingly more solid all the time. I didn't want it to finish materializing, so I started yelling prayers at it at the top of my lungs in the hopes of sending it back to wherever it came from. I woke myself up doing it too, because apparently I was doing it for real. Good times. I wasn't even aware that I still remembered any actual prayers, because I haven't repeated any since I was very young.

The one from last night was no party either. More ghost stuff, and again, I don't remember the whole dream. I just remember this very skinny, middle aged female ghost who looked like she might have been.... a Victorian school teacher maybe. Her hair was parted in the middle and then twisted into a bun on the back of her head and she was wearing a greyish-green dress that looked very severe. The neck of the dress was buttoned all the way up to her chin, and the sleeves were buttoned all the way down to her wrists. Scores of little tiny pearl buttons. So many it must have taken her hours to dress herself for the day. I remember actually looking at the buttons and thinking exactly that thought, too.

I also remember her saying: "When one person is choking another, it's the one who's not being choked that is able to breathe." Then she grabbed me by the neck. However, she didn't strangle me. She just started sucking my soul out through my face. It was very weird and very scary. I honestly wish I didn't remember it. Soul-sucking Victorian ghosts in my head while I sleep: DO NOT WANT!

Last night, I dreamed that scientists had figured out that on a certain day at a certain time, the world would end in a very specific way. Something was supposed to happen to the forces of gravity that hold all the planets in their orbits, completely throwing the tilt of the earth and the make-up of the entire solar system out of whack. Somehow this event was supposed to cause all of the earth's land mass to sink under water, pretty much killing every living thing on it. As this day drew near, there was a lot of panic as to what might happen, but I don't know that anyone truly believed that anything would... including myself.

On the day in question, I was at a bookstore with my mom. I guess she was visiting from California. She offered to buy me a new book as a gift, so I asked for a book on Japan that I had been looking at right before she asked. It was full of photos of geishas and tea houses, as well as little historical tidbits about the country, and I remember being really excited about getting to take it home with me. We were talking and laughing so much, that I had completely forgotten what day it was, but when we came out of the bookstore, the sky was completely red and the light was all strange, instantly reminding me.

I looked out on the horizon and could somehow see a geographical image of the South Pole superimposed over sky itself, as if we were all inside of the type of globe you see in any classroom. Somehow this meant that the earth had tilted a full 180 degrees... all out of whack. Then I saw the moon literally fly across the sky. It basically moved across the same way it does over the course of an entire night, but it did it in a matter of seconds... and it was too big... too close. Everything was all wrong. I remember worrying that one of the other planets might crash into the earth or that we might fly into the sun.

Then I felt this sickening lurch under my feet, as if we were having an earthquake, but different... again... all wrong. I remember feeling panic at knowing everything that was predicted was all coming true. Then I started to notice water rising up through the ground, meaning the land masses were starting to float out to sea and sink, again just as predicted. I still had the book about Japan clutched in my arms, and I remember feeling great regret that I'd never get to read it cover to cover. (For some reason, this book felt very important and it's the detail I remember the most clearly from this dream. I could even still tell you what the cover looked like.) I just had time to feel the ground lurch under my feet again and give way to more water before I apparently woke myself up in a panic.

I'm really not sure why I had this dream. Nothing weird is going on in my life right now, and I didn't eat anything strange before bed. Actually I've been eating super-healthy lately and exercising regularly for a change. Who knows... it could have been anything. It felt worthy of record though, so here it is. Maybe it will make more sense to someone else than it does to me.

So here's a random thought for the day. I just felt like sharing so that I am more likely to remember it myself. I'm sure a lot of you have seen Donnie Darko and remember the scene where Drew Barrymore talks about the famous linguist (it was J.R.R. Tolkien, by the way) who said that "cellar door" is the most beautiful phrase in the English language. If you haven't seen that movie, maybe you at least remember having heard that said before.

I had a weird dream last night where I decided to figure out what two-word phrase was the most beautiful to me... just soundwise... not necessarily having anything to do with the meanings of the words. In the dream, although I don't recall how I came to that conclusion, I decided that for me it was "copper kettle". Heh... actually even conscious I like the sound of the two together although I still couldn't definitively tell you why.

Last night I had the weirdest dream. Normally I don't post too much about stuff like that, but this is one of the ones that felt kind of important. It's also the type of thing that I might like to resurrect and flesh out for a piece of writing or something one day, so I figured I ought to write it down before I forget all about it. It's already kind of beginning to fade a little bit. Normally, I'm in these dreams somewhere, at least as an observer, but this one was different. It was more like watching a movie than anything else.

It took place in a desolate, colonial town that seemed to be very much a ghost town to the eye despite the fact that there were people living there as normally as anything. The buildings were ramshackle with peeling paint and and splintered boards here and there. Everything looked grey and lonely. Doors hung completely off the hinges in some cases, and I even remember specifically seeing a barn with the door completely missing. You could see some chickens inside, and a couple of starving grey wolves or coyotes sniffing around looking for eggs, but there were none because the chickens were so malnourished.

The wind was so strong and blew so often that it would shred anything people tried to hang on the outside of the buildings to make them pretty within a day or so. The same was so with any fresh paint the townspeople tried to add to their homes to cheer things up, as well as any pretty clothes they tried to wear. Everything and everyone was just grey, dry, desolate, stagnant, and I knew that this town was meant to represent the whole world. There was one person there that wasn't grey though, and didn't appear to belong there at all. He was the school teacher. He wore a deep red velvet suit and had shiny black hair and twinkling eyes. He was full of energy, life and light while everyone else lacked those things.

He was also very gifted when it came to mathematical theory, and he had somehow come up with an equation that could determine the outcome of a man's life. When you plugged in certain variables distinct to each person, and worked the equation, you came out with a number. Usually the answer one got was 1 (meaning the person was destined to live a lonely, hopeless existence) or 0 (meaning the person would die prematurely and/or without making any type of difference). You could change the variables in accordance with different choices the person might make about himself or his life to see if the number was different under different circumstances as well, but usually you still came out with a 1 or a 0.

Eventually, the school teacher worked the equation to determine the outcome of his own life, and he too came up with a 1 or a 0 each and every time. He was surprised, because he always thought he was someone who would wind up making a difference, or living a good life. He tried to find a way to work it so that the solution came out differently, but he couldn't. This depressed him so much, along with the knowledge that this was the outcome for most men, that he decided to kill himself. Before he did so, he wrote the equation on the chalkboard in the school, telling the children he taught that unless someone could find a different solution by a certain time on a certain day, he was going to consider his life worthless and end it.

The children of course did not want to see their teacher do such a thing, so they all worked very hard with the equation to come up with a solution that was not a 1 or a 0. Eventually, one little boy found a way to solve it so that the answer was a 2, meaning that there was a possibility that the teacher would be able to live the type of life he wanted to, and that was really all he needed, so he decided he would rather live.

Seriously... really bizarre stuff, eh? But interesting. What do you guys think of it?