Tag Archives: dream

Dream: Back to school

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I was in a dark, oddly deserted apartment, where I noticed that there was no TV. I thought about my roommate, realizing that I’d seen her here only once, several days ago.

I was eating lunch at a picnic table with two boys I understood to be my friends, although they were ignoring me. Suddenly there was something I had to tell them. They didn’t listen at first, but I felt immensely gratified when I did get their full attention.

“I just had a vision or dream in which my major was hiking and backpacking,” I told them as though this were the most wondrous thing in the world, which to me it was, even as I mentally noted that I had not mentioned anything difficult, e.g., rafting. They seemed happy for me.

I asked the boy next to me for a tiny piece of the half chicken he’d just taken, but instead he gave me something from the scraps left behind. I felt distinctly unloved and unappreciated.

As in other dream, I recalled that I have a degree, and I was starting to realize that not only was my academic performance just as bad this time, but that I wasn’t getting the degree I seemed to want, in hiking and backpacking.

That will teach me to sign up for Road Scholar.

Dream: Drowning bridge

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I lived on a flexible, rust-painted bridge that snaked its way around a large body of water. Just as I was thinking how fortunate it was that the bridge didn’t dip underwater, I noticed that the end of it next to me was submerged and that I was clinging to a portion that was barely above water level.

I also realized that the bridge had an intelligence and will of its own and that I didn’t know what it might do next. It seemed that the end was caught underwater, but I wasn’t sure.

I became aware of a boy nearby hanging onto my parents’ open back door and wondered if they’d adopted him. Determined to save him, I reached out, but he cowered from me.

I didn’t know where they were, I realized.

Dream: Watery apocalypse

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I was under the desk at home, lighting matches and throwing them down. If the papers I was trying to light caught fire, I put it out quickly. It flared once, so I had to tell my dad, then I thought about getting a blanket.

I was in a very narrow pool in what could have been an industrial setting, swimming toward a woman who could have been a coach or a friend. I sensed that I was training for something big, even the Olympics, but the setting was all wrong — more like something from a Batman movie or a book than real life. I wanted to avoid the woman.

I had to go to the bathroom, but the toilets were lined up along the pool, and they were too high for me to reach, as though they had been built for giants, or I was very small.

Outside my elementary school auditorium, where I was waiting for a symposium to begin, I saw a man I recognized from HR, and he saw me. When he came over, I noticed that he carried a suitcase emblazoned with reach.com and realized I’d met him at another event.

I marveled at the idea that I was networking.

Inside the auditorium, the stage disappeared, and we could see Lake Erie as though through a window. The water was rising in impossibly shaped columns and in a cataclysmic tumult. The audience seemed frozen in terror, but I had to do something. The end seemed near.

At the administrative office, I found the staff going about business as usual. Through their windows I could see an idyllic sunny summer day. I ran to a door to the outside, opened it, and saw more sun. I recalled the horror in the auditorium and wondered which universe was real.

Dream: Island

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I was looking at an island full of animals, each a single example of its species. All off them stood or lay around, looking exhausted or helpless. One, a cat or hyena, appeared to be emaciated.

To my surprise, they showed no interest in interacting with one another. Surrounded by prey, the gaunt cat/hyena seemed unwilling or unable to move.

Among the animals was a tarsier that looked out of place on the island’s sands, out of the trees. It seemed especially vulnerable.

Abruptly, a kudu attacked the tarsier, carrying it off. All of this was so out of the natural order that I watched in shock, feeling a separation but not a detachment.

I was afraid to watch, but couldn’t help myself. The kudu didn’t know what to do with the tarsier and kept licking it, although it did appear to want to eat it. The tarsier made no effort to escape, appearing to be resigned to its fate.

I felt horrified and inexpressibly sad, as though witnessing part of an apocalypse.

Dream: Unwelcome guest

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I was hosting a reception at a reunion when a woman came in and made herself at home without a word. I may have tried talking to her to find out who she was and why she was there, but her actions and silence inflamed me into an irrational righteous anger. I screamed and drove her out. She didn’t make a sound or acknowledge me.

I returned to the room, which now seemed like a kitchen, and wrote a nasty note to her. When I tried to deliver it (how could I know where?), I found the room of one of my oldest friends from elementary school, but I hesitated to knock. I wasn’t sure of myself.

After leaving my note with indignation, I returned to the reception room/kitchen and found the business card-sized invitations. They consisted of two lines labeled “a” and “b.” I discovered the one I somehow knew had been sent to the mystery woman. The “a” line was addressed to her. The “b” line expressed a heartfelt hope that she would attend the reception from which I had so angrily and crudely ejected her.

It was from my dad.

I had just revealed myself to be an irrational, cranky fishwife to someone my dad knew and liked well enough to invite to the reception. I wondered if she were confused and surprised by the vitriolic reception she’d received and what she would think of my poor father, who had invited her with such warmth.

I wondered about what is wrong with me that I could act so.

Dream: Being human

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Clearly I’ve seen too many adverts for Being Human on BBC America. They’ve crept into my dreams. However scary it may be, it’s no more horrifying than everyday life.

I saw a high school classmate receive an assignment, with different groups to complete different parts. While I witnessed everything, I missed what I was supposed to do. I went to the group I knew to be mine, but I didn’t know them, and they didn’t know me. The more desperate I became, the more they ignored me. I didn’t know the consequences of my ignorance or inaction, of there were any. Intense frustration washed over me.

That wasn’t the Being Human part. That could be any day, every day . . .

Monstrous beings — vampires, werewolves — were being pursued through the city by a hunt club. Not entirely visible, they fled hounds and horses. Their flight led the club into the track of an oncoming train. I couldn’t bear to look at the carnage. When I finally did, however, I saw that the train had cut cleanly through part of the lead dog’s face, so that it was in three-quarters profile, with no gore as though it were a paper cutout. I realized that the rest of the tableau must be like that. They were now frozen in place in time, caught in pursuit, with parts of their being slashed harmlessly and painlessly away. Yet I could sense infinite sadness in the lead hound, and the same sadness overcame me.

When I woke up, I realized that what I’d seen had not been a hound or even a dog.

It had been a fox.

Dream: Ducks in a row

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While looking out the kitchen window at home, I saw my dad pulling a red wagon followed by what I thought was a mechanical duck. I wondered what kept it following him so neatly — a magnet? A string? By the time he’d turned down the middle row, I’d caught up with the wagon, which was now followed by a line of live ducks, most of them young. I couldn’t tell what kept the ducks in line and so attached to the wagon. I felt compelled to scratch them under their bills, which some but not all tolerated.

Although this scene seemed inexpressibly charming to me, suddenly I wanted to move me and my dad into a shared two-bedroom apartment. I found one for $1,300 a month, which I thought we could afford between us. My own actions made me sad, and I missed the ducks and their parade with my dad.

Nightmare that never ends

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The BP oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico is sickening, beyond the fact that 11 men died needlessly, leaving bewildered and bereaved families behind. I’ve avoided most of the news and photos about it because it makes me ill. Not simply upset or disturbed, which are natural reactions, but physically ill. Ill for the Gulf people whose hardships seem never to end, for the wildlife whose mute suffering speaks volumes, and for the environment that won’t recover in my lifetime, or those of generations of descendants.

My protective shell is imperfect. There’s so much news, most of it bad, that some gets through. Today I saw a Yahoo News headline about sea creatures congregating near the shore, while birds soaked in oil crawl off into the marshes, never to be seen again. That image alone breaks my heart. But my heart is a small thing in a sea of loss and despair.

In the early hours of the morning, I dreamed as though from a future vantage point that the well was never contained, that in time the oceans turned to oil, then the earth. It wasn’t just me who was helpless to stop it. It was all of us.

Right now I don’t care whose fault it is or who is accusing who of what. I want it plugged so that not one drop of oil ever escapes from it again. I wanted it plugged or diverted now, not in a few months when possibly — possibly! — relief wells may — may! — alleviate the volume. I want all the best engineering minds to focus their theoretical thoughts and practical experience on this singular calamity. I want it fixed, and then I want those entrusted with power to make sure this, and anything like this, can’t and won’t happen again.

I want the suffering to end, for life to go back to normal, for birds to go back to raising their young, not crawling off in anguish to perish miserably.

I want us to break our cycle of addiction to oil and other dirty energy.

I want the clean world we’ve never had.

Dream: I earn a degree without remembering

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I was watching boys I’d known in high school performing at my college, which confused me. That they were playing the part of dogs controlled by a man at center stage confused me more, but as an audience member I responded enthusiastically.

One of them, TL, called me over and handed me a request to pick up his medication. I began wandering the labyrinthine halls of a rundown Gothic building with scratched wooden doors that were missing locks, trying to find what I guessed to be a formulating pharmacy. I understood that this errand wasn’t important to the boy and that he’d wanted me to go away, but I also knew that the request was for asthma medication. I kept hearing, “Asthma: Life or death.”

Finally, after having almost blundered into a secret research lab (one of the doors without a lock), I came away with two bottles of medication. The only bathrooms I could find were filthy. I thought about a couple of people I’d seen and wondered how they could have come to be here. They shouldn’t and couldn’t be here, but here they were.

I looked up to find DK staring at me as he was coming down an incongruous escalator, but in an epiphany I realized I no longer cared and that somehow I had earned a graduate degree in political science. I couldn’t remember a single course. I’ve done it again, I thought, squeaked out a degree without having learned anything.

At some point, now or earlier, I was walking along a highway and up a ramp toward home. The ramp suddenly blended into a grassy, rock-covered hill with no signs of highway or pavement in any direction.

I felt more lost than ever.