…geographically, that is. Is it somewhere you once lived? A particular place? The answers there were scattered and whimsically interesting. Mine very rarely involve people I know, and they don’t involve people I write about—though sometimes it’s a half-grown-up version of the gang from my old neighborhood, occasionally, very rarely, it’s Jane; occasionally it’s old family stuff. And many places are places I’ve never actually been. I used to think somewhen I’d like to live in an old Victorian house, but I’ve had so many weird dreams about a place like that I don’t think I’d be comfortable in a place with too many doors.
Weirder still, when Jane and I were househunting, we went into a few, and I’d be real enthusiastic at first, but after a little bit of walking around, these places began to ‘tell me stories,’ in a weird way…just like echoes of feelings, never words, just weird stuff. A writer’s brain IS a haunted attic, I fear. We’re probably the scariest thing ever to wander the halls.
I’ve noticed that when I take acetaminophen, my dreams are particularly vivid. It may be a factor that I sleep more deeply when my hands aren’t aching. I used to dream a lot about the house we lived in when I was aged 6-12, but I rarely dream about the house we lived in next or any houses I’ve lived in since. I used to have dreams about walking in a straight line, and when I came to a house, I would walk through the house (using the doors, of course) It was always nighttime in those dreams, and I wonder sometimes if I was astrally projecting. Sometimes my dreams are just a jumble of imagery, and sometimes they have a plot or at least a kind of internal logic. I once dreamed a whole short story — already plotted out from start to finish. It unfolded like a movie. Now if I could just write it like I dreamed it. . .
I sometimes dream the house in which I grew up, but the one frequently recurring element in my dreams is elaborately detailed structures, either houses or some generalized public type: a museum, for example (although it may not resemble any real world museum, but that’s what my dream labels it). Even when I dream of my childhood home, I often find new rooms added onto the basement.
I often dream real-world people who are important to me, but in many cases they seem to be symbolic. I rarely dream about fictional characters, but in one memorable dream, Sha Gojyo from Saiyuki was one of my co-workers.
That’s a big question. I haven’t remembered much of my dream life since my parents died. I have been hoping, now that things have settled down a bit, my memory of my dreams, and active dreaming, would return, but so far, still only rarely. For a while there, college and after, I would sometimes have “aware” or directed/lucid dreams, even a couple of times when I was waking and still half in the dream state…dream images overlaid on the waking world until I woke fully. Mostly very neat. One dream, though, wasn’t explainable by anything I know rationally/logically. At the time, I thought it was just very realistic and scary, just a nightmare. It later turned out it had actually happened. Not quite as I saw it, but the gist was there, and the end result. *That*, I don’t begin to know how to explain, and I don’t claim to be particularly “psychic” or “sensitive.” One of the things that still puzzles me is, why me? I didn’t think that person and I were very close. I will always wonder about it, one of the few “scientifically inexplicable” things I’ve directly experienced.
—–
Anyway, about dreams, *where* my dreams are set. Typically, “home” is the home I grew up in or my grandmother’s home, or the home my parents had when I was in college and after — usually some mix of those. My current home seems not to be “home” in my dream-world, just a house. (It usually feels that way in my waking world too. Most of my time has been away from it, so not much sentimental bond.)
For some odd reason, my dreams lately have often had college, errands, or (rarely, thank goodness) hospital-like settings. Some version of a college dorm like or not like the dorm room I had. Or various buildings. Going in, out, around, various rooms and doors, things to do. There are sometimes places I’ve never been and not aware of having imagined before, and often, as dreams go, a scene will change in the midst of things, and it’s subtly or radically different.
People in my dreams are sometimes people I know or knew, other times, dreamed up, imaginary/pretend…either symbolic or some combination of memory and problem-solving. — I feel sure our dreams involve sorting through the junk of the day’s events as well as problem-solving…or playing with ideas. Whether any of it is “real” in some other realm/dimension, whether we can see ahead or the past, I don’t know.
There were a few recurring dreams I had as a kid and teen. I’ve once or twice had those (or elements from them) as an adult. One drew on a kid’s-eye viewing of the Mysterious Island movie, Ray Harryhausen’s work on the Jules Verne novel. (Cue the “giant flightless bird.” That dang thing has chased me in dreams a few times. LOL. I think I learned, after a few visits, how to outdo it.)
There was one dream sequence that seemed fairly real as a kid, but it’s never happened, and I doubt it ever will. Although risky, it seemed, well, an adventure, despite the feeling of danger and risk in the dream. Very science fictional, too.
Hmm…the more “mature audiences only” content that started around adolescence, now that initially went right past me. I didn’t, at first, get the significance, though looking back, pre-teen and early teen dreams I remember, yup, the message was clear, I just didn’t understand that was what it was yet. Of course, once you’re mature enough, these things become rather self-evident. But I wasn’t prepared for that either. …And that was later one of the ways I knew that aspect of myself wasn’t going to change. I wasn’t raised to, and didn’t expect, that. Dealing with it was a mixed bag, even into adult life.
For a while there, after my parents had passed away, my dreams grew so inexplicably, graphically upsetting that I wanted to stop dreaming like that. I believe I somehow put up the block in waking, conscious memory that’s still apparently active. But for a long time now, I’ve wanted that to dissolve, to ease up, so I can get back that very useful, or at least sometimes entertaining, part of my inner life. It seems to have eased up at times, so possibly it’s headed that way. I didn’t have much of any problem like that after my grandmother passed away last year. I think I was, by then, already prepared and had already grieved some, and exhaustion played into it too. I haven’t had trouble in that regard since, and only a time or two has she appeared in a dream. Few visits from my parents in my dreams lately, either.
I suppose it makes sense, in the dream-world way that things make sense there, that we get visits from old relatives or friends, some of whom are no longer living, and others who are no longer in our lives. Likewise for places.
The characters and settings we’ve never known in real life, so far as we know from conscious memories, are just as interesting, and sometimes so real. Are they projections, our mind’s way of sorting and planning and puzzling out or imagining? Are they perhaps sometimes from our past…or maybe our future…or some other alternate reality/timeline that intersects with ours? I don’t know, but it’s fascinating. (My idea of the “afterlife” is that it’s some other reality or dimension connected to our present, real world…a way to say in some halfway scientific way that there’s something else there we don’t understand.)
Of course, that’s all well and good if the things we dream of are things we’d like to be in real life, even the more fantastical or outlandish and improbable things (the things that make sense or are possible only in dreams). — But nightmare stuff, the scary/creepy or gee-I-hope-that’s-not-possible or I-really-don’t-want-that-to-ever-happen kind of things, I don’t know if or how those are connected. Maybe they are “farther away” in the alternate realities/dimensions of that “multiverse,” the places where the rules we know don’t apply, or where things have gone drastically strange and different from how we know (or would want).
The dream-world, the things we dream, how things work in dreams, it’s all so unlike the real world sometimes, and other times, it feels real, or it’s like the real world, but not. — Fascinating subject.
Once in a while, there are people, creatures, or things, or situations, that turn up in dreams, that it would sure be nice if we could have in real life. Who knows, maybe they’re “real” in some sense while we dream of them. (Except yeah, the stuff I don’t like, I hope not. 😉 )
Still worth pondering the what-if’s and why’s and wherefore’s. Or the somewhens.
Amazing thing, the dream-world, whatever it is.
I dream of all different places. One house I dream of frequently I think of as being my Aunt and Uncle’s — only their house wasn’t at all like the dream house. But the oddest places I dream of are places I haven’t been … yet. I remember a vivid dream of a museum. And then the next day Mom took my brother and I there. It was a huge and tangled old building, and my brother needed the restroom. Mom had no idea where to start looking. Needless to say, they were flabbergasted when I led them straight to it. And no, it wasn’t well marked.
Once I dreamed I was on the bridge of The Pride, I was walking to my station and the girls of the crew hardly noticed
Occasionally I will dream about the house where I grew u, more often it is a strange house, but very large with a lot of rooms, dark Wuthering Heights like with shelves and shelves of books. A few have been at your place with Shejidanites eating, singing and once doing an all night out loud read of Foreigner!
I had a Shejicon dream too. Everyone in the back yard eating and working on the fence. At least I haven’t had any canoe nightmares
None of dragging one of the Stonehenge monoliths through the Okefenokee Swamp? Seriously—we do think of that when we work with that fountain! And you really are pretty good with a canoe. 😉
No dreams of monoliths, I’m afraid of what Freud would say
Freud liked cigars. Just saying.
He seems to have had a few personal hang ups regarding the female of the species.
Though he had some points, one tends to take what he said with a modicum of salt.
Besides, doesn’t that 2001monolith look more like a domino? It doesn’t look like, well, that other thing. ;D Not that that other thing is a problem, though.
It would appear I got sidetracked again.
I have lifelong had dreams about being a fugitive in village houses and tunnels in WWII France; we are evading the Nazis and doing sabotage, blowing up trucks and such. My companions are an older version of the gang I ran with from 6 to 10. I dream about a Victorian house, and getting broken down in a car on a forested dirt road leading to it, when things start going wrong in the woods; or being in the house, and going from room to room on the same game plan as dodging the Nazis.
I used to think I wanted one of those old painted ladies to live in—but I changed my mind on that, as per above.
A few actual places I dream about is the woods and creekside at girl’s camp; and dodging around gran’s farm with my cousins, sometimes on the day we had to fight the range fire.
And then there are off the wall things like losing Jane in St. Petersburg with all those bridges, —neither us has ever been in St. Petersburg—and we’re trying to meet up and she’s always crossing the river on some other bridge to the side I just left.
You’d think I’d dream about people I write about, but not actually. Those are waking acquaintances.
I think everybody goes through a period of no-recall on dreams: it happens to me when I’ve been particularly stressed, cures itself, eventually. Relaxing at bedtime, doing some reading rather than just crashing…seems to help.
Dreams of our place, eh? One of these days we’ve got to do another Shejicon: Pegleg Pete’s head finally got blown out of the hawthorn tree in this last spate of storms. This may be a sign.
Lately, my dreams have been of places I’ve been before, my high school, or a factory where I had a summer job. Some of the dreams are kind of eerie in a “Myst” sort of way, there’s nobody but me in the dream. I don’t even remember what I’m doing now, because without some of the medications they were giving me, the dreams aren’t as vivid.
Poor Pete! Hanging around in that tree for 2 years without the rest of him. Changeling did a number on him, and I guess the storms finished him off. You are right, we need to do another ShejiCon. I really had a great time there, even with my refusing to take my medications. Jane was very upset that I didn’t take them, and made me promise that I would faithfully take the prescriptions I was supposed to take. Given that the lack of medication should have made me a very morose and moody person, I think the people with whom I was in company made it just the opposite.
This is not quite an answer to your question, but something interesting related to dreams from the Yoga Vasistha, an ancient Sanskrit text:
“One who wakes up from a dream thinks, ‘It is like this, and not like that which I saw in the dream.’ After death too, one thinks, ‘It is like this, and not like that which I saw before death.’ The dream may be brief, and the life may be long, but the experience of the moment is the same in both. Just as in one lifetime one experiences hundreds of dreams, so until one attains enlightenment, one experiences hundreds of waking states. Just as some people remember their dreams, some people remember their past experiences.”
I keep running into Sanskrit text references lately. It may mean I should pay attention and read up. Where should I start, with no real background aside from what filters into popular culture?
Sanskrit literature is such a vast and diverse field that it can be very confusing. And there are large numbers of bad translations for every good one.
I would suggest that you start with the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads in the Penguin Classics versions, translated by Juan Mascaro. They are both slim, readable books, translated into natural-sounding clear English. They are beautiful, uplifting, inspiring and profound.
Don’t be put off by the first chapter of the Bhagavad Gita. The Gita is a detour within a larger epic work, so at the beginning there are some references to characters and events outside of the Gita itself.
Amazon link
Thanks, GreenWyvern. Both those are now on order.
One of the very few “real world” people I have dreamed about intermittently since a child is Queen Elizabeth II. Never have recallable dreams about friends or family members, but I dream about her. Go figure. Oddly, one of my earliest childhood memories is of watching the film of her coronation on TV (Motorola), and being perturbed at my toddler brother for getting in the way of the screen. That and watching my da cut strips of pie dough for a lattice top pie crust using the jaggedy edge of the wheel that turned the whisks of a large egg beater. The purpose of this exercise was to make the strips of pie dough look like they’d been cut out with pinking shears. He was rolling out the pie dough on the kitchen table, which had an oil cloth table cloth. I remember watching the painted red crank handle of the egg beater come around and thinking, “This time round it will touch the dough.” But, it never did.
I used to think that I rarely dreamed until I started doing some work with a Jungian analyst wh, of course, wanted to work with them. She started me on writing them down and boy did the lid of the dream box fly off. I think that they were just waiting for me to start paying attention.
Mostly not real places except for a bunch that centered around my grandmother’s house. I finally sat up in the middle of the night after one of them and wrote out all my associations with that house and my grandmother (who never appeared in the dreams). Three legal pages of associations!
Once I did that I realised that my grandmother was a dark presence in the middle of everything, and I have not had another dream of that house since … to my relief.
A few of the dreams are incredibly hightened – more real than real, with a flavor that lingers into the waking hours.
Those are magical and and I cherish them.
A couple have had prescient elements. When that becomes obvious it is a bit eerie. Again it can take a little time to figure out what the foreshadowing is of. But once I do the element is unmistakeable.
My parents have been in a few.
Being prepared to write them down and disciplining myself to do so right on waking up seems to encourage dreaming and dream recall for me as, of course, getting enough sleep!
For the most part in my life I haven’t remembered my dreams to the point of waking up and having nothing other than remembering laying down and relaxing to go to sleep, with the occasional toss and turn. I DID have two or three recurring dreams that I could never describe afterwards, but each time I had them I’d get ‘a bit more of the story’. On waking I always knew when I’d had one, but it faded so quickly and I never wrote them down because they were gone by the time I could function enough to write.
I had some lucid dreams, including one in 4th grade where I fell asleep worrying about dying ‘before I’d done anything’, before I’d made my mark on the world. A short while later I felt all floaty and when I looked around it was like I was floating over the bed I shared with my sister – and we were both lying there, but with a bit of a gauze fuzziness and this odd round thing slightly below me. I thought about it a moment and realized that the gauze-thingy was the ceiling and the round thingy was the ceiling light. I was very calm, almost tranquil, as I thought to myself, ‘Is this what it’s like being dead? This isn’t so bad! But, wait, if I’m up here, who’s down there taking care of things? WAH!” Then I felt like a huge rubber band in my belly button had suddenly contracted and yanked me back into my body. I jerked so hard I bounced up off the bed (lil sis never even twitched). I never talked about it with anyone at the time, but after that I was a lot more calm about my eventual demise and able to focus on less morbid things. Many years later I read a book about Astral Projection and the ‘cord’ that connects your spirit self to your body….at the navel.
At one point in my life I made a concerted effort to remember my dreams. Be careful what you ask for! They were generally lucid dreams and so vivid I would wake up more tired than when I went to bed. Only a very few had anyone I knew in them, the rest were full of total strangers, but they were all full of color, sound and action, though I rarely remember any smells. I was able to consciously direct my actions in the dream, but never able to affect any of the dream-scape or the ‘people’ in it. It finally reached the point that I had to take medications to knock me out so I could get some deep rest – only Melatonin did the trick. Now I’m back to ‘lights out’ and no memories of the dreams.
My take on your experience, CJ, is that you are actually quite sensitive to energy, and were in fact running into the spirits of those who had lived in the houses; the spirit energy lingers and the spirits tend to work with images, symbols, and feelings, and less so with words. The dreams of that victorian house though, are most likely connected to your memories of a past life where you lived in it.
I’d say most of the older houses could tell you such stories, with the victorian ones being especially rich, since that era had a lot of emotional repression going on. Plus a lot of their owners really loved their houses and even after death tend to wander back and hang around.
The fairly well-known ghost at E.R. Rogers (although the restaurant closed and it’s a private residence now) is one such. The man built it for his wife, but lost it thru bankruptcy or something. They then moved away, but after she died, she returned and is still hanging around. Usually, when we used to go eat there, I’d see her hanging around by an upstairs window, look out over the water. The floor to the attic was removed to give more of a ‘cathedral ceiling’ feel to the restaurant but she just hovers up there, like the floor is still in place
I wonder how the new owners feel about that… it caused a bit of a stir with the restaurant owners and staff because she tended to move things around and knock stuff off shelves and such.
I’ve tried astral projection myself, but partly because of a protective energy ‘spell’ my grandmother put around me to protect me from the dark and negative cult energy stuff, and probably my unconscious fear of being too vulnerable to those forces, I haven’t been all that successful in doing it. I did get the spell removed, but haven’t tried the astral projection stuff since then.
I’ve also tried to do lucid dreaming but I never seem to be able to realize that I’m dreaming, no matter how weird the dreams are. They seem perfectly normal to me, even when I start out driving my car down a country dirt road, it turns into a bicycle I’m riding, and then I’m walking thru a store where all of a sudden I’m working at the espresso bar and don’t have any milk… My dreams rarely make sense although while dreaming they do. My sweetie has told me about dreams where he realizes he’s dreaming because he knows that something like that would never happen when he’s awake. That would be nice to be aware of, I think!
Anyway, my dreams are usually in a composite of places I’ve known and been and places unfamiliar to me, like the drive thru window might be from the coffee shop I had while the shop itself is more like a store I’ve never seen; that sort of thing. I, too, have dreamed of a victorian house on occasion, but since remembering my most recent past life where I lived in that very house in the Cape Cod area, I’ve come to realize it *is* a place I know.
I used to be alone in my dreams, with only strangers around, but as I’ve resolved my relationship issues, nowadays, usually my sweetie or ex or family members are with me as I wander on. I am always moving in my dreams, looking for something usually. I don’t have conversations in general, just comments in the moment with whoever is with me. Definitely dreams are different but yet similar to waking life. I just wish I could lucid dream; that would be very interesting, I think.
Location depends rather on the kind of dream, though in general I don’t seem to be very architecturally aware. As to the kinds of dreams, for this purpose I’d recognise at least three different kinds.
The first are generally short dreams that in memory are very hard to distinguish from real life. These of course play out in real-life-like settings. Example: noticing a button missing on my blouse; some time later asking my mom if she could repair it if she could find a fitting replacement; asking her three days later if she’d repaired it and discovering that I never asked her, just dreamed I had. Or waking up to the alarm clock and shutting it off, turning on the bedside lamp, opening the curtain, getting dressed, breakfasting and leaving for wors – to wake up either in the middle of the night with the light on and the curtain open, or to the third alarm clock across the room noisily telling me I’ve only 15 minutes left to get up and go to work – while my arms have been ‘sleepwalking’ through shutting of the first alarm, pulling open the curtain and turning on the light. I’ve never sleepwalked for real, but these movement my arms can make while I’m sleeping, if I dream that particular sequence. In that case, the location is clearly my real-world bedroom and house.
Same goes for the old dream of a large spider sitting on the end of my bed, which my body used to scare me awake when I didn’t wake up when it needed me to go to the loo. Fortunately, I’ve not had that one since it discoved it can also wake me with a hot flash.
Least interesting, there are the usual jumbled images and snatches of action and speech that are mostly generated from things I’ve seen and heard, including stuff I’ve read, combined with stuff I remember, that I consider just ‘working through what happened’, uninteristing but needed for memory consolidation, I gather. Strangely enough, the people who figure in these snatches are often unidentified ; ‘generic’ people, and sometimes a recognisable person from everyday life who didn’t really figure in that interaction. The locations are also generally not well defined: in my sleeping mind I know I’m ‘at the office’, and it looks generically office-like and incorporates element from known offices, but is mostly not recognisible as a specific office.
These are what I mostly have nowadays, and I generally don’t remember my dreams, except for a sense of urgency and being very busy; and what I remember fades within minutes. Hey, I just realised something. Maybe not finding these interesting, and being so very unspecific about everything except feelings and sometimes words or actions in this, is a partial reason why my memory is so unreliable and often fragmentary or inaccurate as to time, place and person!
Most interesting are the vivid and colourful story-dreams, but I’ve not dreamed many of those since I was a teenager. Those had clearly delineated fantastic setting, but elements of those were often based on real-life elements. As I was a teenager, a lot of them had something to do with school. Examples are dreaming about biking home from school, but the crossing at the edge of town didn’t have traffic lights and some cars, but was shut off by large barred iron gates, and you had to look carefully left and right for crossing dinosaurs before opening the little inset gate and scurrying across and through the opposite gate. The municipal outdoor pool on the other side of the crossing was suddenly connected to an indoor pool, which connected with half-filled brick-arched underground waterways which looked like the pancake restaurant in the wharf cellars in the city, where we’d eaten twice. Alas, one of the dinosaurs was enormous, and stepped over the crossings-gate and rampaged through the swimming-pool roof and ate me, so the next I knew I was watching from up on a cloud while it curled up like a sleeping cat on some unknown scrubby coastline and had a nap with its belly full.
There are generally no familiar people in them; even I am often not as usual, though I am still me, even when I’m just a 4 inch high glowing blue matchstick figure living with a lot of other similar ‘Hattifnatters’ (from the Moomin books) in a burrow on the edge of a small clearing among some bushes. Then one night instead of hiding in the burrow with the rest I cross the dirt road and sneak through a wood of low, dark, gnarly trees inhabited by large apes, to come to a building somewhat resembling my high school, 3 stories high but with long, brightly lit white-tiled corridors through which I run pursued by a herd of large yellow-and-pink spotted toy giraffes. Some nights I wake up without making it out, sometimes I’d reach the other side of the building and go through the doors into a large, sunny and peaceful conservatory, warm but not hot and humid, full of greenery, flowers and fruit, which is an ideal place to live for a small Hattifnatter like me.
That conservatory also comes into my flying dream, where I can soar through the air in a large mall-style shop, with some other kids, like Wendy, John and Michael in the Disney Peter Pan. When I get tired of swooping from the sock-display to the ceiling fans and the top shelves across the store, a large double utilitarian door opens and we soar along an glassed-in corridor to the conservatory. Strangely, I never hanker for the outdoors, to soar through the sky in complete freedom; the enclosed space with the things I can hang on to at ceiling-height are enough for me. I loved the feeling of soaring, or running endlessly in my dreams up and down the tower stairs and the long corridors in the old castle where my mom was a teacher and I twice had a summer job, wihout getting asthmatic or tired.
Apparently I only dreamt of a limited freedom – a nice sheltered conservatory seems to be my dreaming self’s idea of heaven; and I’ve not had dreams like these in many years.
When I think about it, that’s a pity: it’s as if busy everyday life has drowned out the creative dreaming and the sense of freedom, even if it’s a limited and temporary freedom I was dreaming of.
This is clearly a post thet encourages introspection!
Many of my dreams take place in the house I lived in until I was 47. For a while, after moving into my new house, I dreamed that I was in the old house and couldn’t get out. After a few of these dreams, I took the key to the old house and put it on my keychain. The next time I dreamed of the old house, I had no problems going in or out.
Mostly I don’t remember details about my dreams, unless I have briefly woken up within a couple hours of my normal wake-up time, then returned to sleep. The interrupted sleep cycle seems to make it easy to recall the dreams, if only briefly. For example, this morning I remember being involved with assembling all the major character actors from the Star Trek series together, with the idea to interview them and get down their reminisces before any more of them died off. We got about 2 dozen of the to the venue, then the project fell apart; the equipment proved temperamental, the main interviewers started asking some very fanboi and cringe-inducing questions, while I sat in the corner and winced. Meanwhile, the actors started to gossip together and occasionally snark at each other, ignoring the interviewer.
I’m lucky in that I rarely have bad dreams. I remember one where I was in an abusive relationship, and my SO (not IRL) had me pinned against a wall and was threatening me with a knife. I had gotten cut, but I don’t remember the pain of that, what I do remember was the feelings of helplessness and fear, which is not my usual reaction in that type of dream.
Many of my dreams are set in or around some type of academic building or campus. I can sometimes identify elements from one or the other of the schools I attended, but there is usually some twist, a new room or stairwell or building. Sometimes it’s the area where I grew up, also with a twist; I often repeat venues.
Some dreams involve flying, but it’s a weird kind, where I just skim along a foot or two off the ground; I almost never take off.
Due to sleep-apnea, I used to defer all of my dreaming unitl I was in a partially- waking state and sometimes able to direct the dreams a bit. I can particularly remember soaring on the wind more or less in the ski-jumper’s aerofoil position. It seemed perfectly natural at the time. Waking up and distinguishing dream from reality can get pretty confused when one slowly and incrementally awakes groggy, sleep and dream deprived.
I dream a lot of space, even though I’ve never been off-planet. I’ve read a lot of SF, so that’s no surprise. I have lots of transportation dreams. I’m in a plane or on a train, and these have novel features. Once I dreamed I was on an elevated train. In the dream, I’d forgotten something, and, with a slap to my forehead , I zipped “downstairs” as the train went along, so I could retrieve whatever it was from my apartment. I woke up thinking that having my apartment travel with me would be very slick. 🙂
My dreams? Well, when they make enough sense to remember, they’re usually in places I’ve been. Kind of interesting that it’s mostly schools that I’ve attended. Sometimes they’re more like memories, but edited for less embarrassment. Or more of something else.
My better dreams have me in strange places. Usually…in the air. When I have dreams of flying, it’s never in a plane, always that magical flying where you just spread your arms and kite around the sky, and never mind physics. Most of the time in those flying dreams, I’m in a place, but I have no idea where in the world it could be, if it even exists. The most prominent features are golden-white, sandstone hills, with clinging shrubs and trees in all the little crevices such stone has. And there’s the sense that it’s desert, or semi-desert, country – dry, hot, but with the wind from me flying it’s a nice kind of heat.
And then there’s this lake – actually in the hills, like a gigantic goblet carved out of a mountain sized piece of stone. It’s the deepest, purest blue, the water in this lake. It’s almost perfectly circular – I suppose a caldera? Though I don’t know how there could be a sandstone volcano. But again, a dream, so bah science. The lake has a waterfall, where the lip of the caldera lowers, and the water pours out as from a graceful ewer. The second pool is deep, but sort of narrow, and the river that springs forth has cut a canyon through the rocks; there’s white water down there, and I know (of course) not to go swimming in the lower part. And somehow I know that the water in the caldera is deliciously cold, and tastes of fresh rain.
Another type of dream I tend to be happy with is dreams where I’m in my grandmother’s house. It’s only rarely that those are uncomfortable dreams. (And once was right after my grandmother died, and how is that surprising?)
The weirdest dreams I have are ones where I’m doing something or other – in real life – and the dream itself seems real enough to have happened…and then, weeks later, it DOES happen, pretty much *exactly* as in the dream. Freaky. But completely useless, because it’s never anything important! It’s always just some inconsequential conversation, and never more than about a minute of “real deja vu.” I mean, really, if you’re going to have precognition, shouldn’t it be more…practical? Hahah!
If I ever dream of space it’s usually a fairly terrifying dream, with a horrific sense of pressure on my chest; I guess my dreaming mind sees space as a bad place for unassisted flight!
I very rarely remember my dreams, but they’re usually real-world settings even if bizarre things (like a tornado during a blizzard) are happening. Intense movies sometimes trigger dreams. The Tom Cruise version of War of the Worlds inspired one of me being a refugee, hiding from the bad aliens, in a (mostly) abandoned hospital that had a “phantom” floor that only I could get to (but not all the time, it came and went). I had to follow the sound of an ancient radio playing 50’s standards to find the entrance.