September 27, 2009
I was going to post the last blog entry from my old blog today, but Sunday rolls around quickly and the urge to write something new and connect with my readers (wherever they may be) tugs at my instincts. As usual, the idea of what to write often dawns on me the morning of writing and this morning is no exception.
I didn’t sleep well last night. My body was sore from doing a month’s worth of yard work in two hours and a lot of thoughts danced in my brain. I awoke several times during the early morning hours and every time I laid my head back down to sleep strange dreams took over.
I’ve talked about strange dreams before in this blog (see ‘Paranormal?’ and ‘The Sleep Study’) but all of the dreams I experienced last night (and there were many) concerned my family. I get along with most of my family well enough, but we aren’t super tight and we don’t visit or call that often, and I really don’t dream about them all that often either.
In the first one I remember I woke up from a dream (in the dream) about my mother and father separating. It was early Sunday morning, still dark, and I decided to slip out of bed, get dressed, and WALK to my parents’ house (without telling my wife, who was sleeping right beside me). I’m in Windsor; my parents are in Sebastopol… it’s a good 20 miles away.
Needless to say, I get there later in the day. My parents live on a half-acre on a hill, so they can pretty much see anyone coming up the road. As I get closer, I see the four young children in our family (my brother’s and my cousins’) come running from the house dressed up in cow costumes, excited to see me (I almost never see them in real life).
But as I reach the driveway, they are all gone and it’s just my mother and my dad. My dad is packing his truck and my mother explains to me that dad has decided to leave her. She’s not all that upset about it (I think they’ve been married close to 40 years). In fact, she’s rather pragmatic about the whole affair.
In the dream, my dad doesn’t want to talk; he just keeps loading up his truck. My mom explains that it was his idea to leave. She says he feels guilty for what kind of husband and father he has been. Yeah, he was a hard dude, but I think we’ve cut him some slack over it through the years.
Anyways, my mom is going into town for a few things and offers me a lift back home. When I get back home, Shandell isn’t all that mad that I left (and that I WALKED). She also seemed to care less that my parents were splitting up.
Through a few more interludes of family dreams I come to one about my brother. We haven’t spoken in over two years (this is true); we don’t exactly get along in real life. In the dream, my brother has broken that silence and made first contact by sending me a message over the phone that can be viewed on my big screen plasma TV (I’m not exactly sure if that’s possible, but in the dream it is kind of cool).
So I indulge him and he’s on the screen with his kids showing me this new game where you stick in these big slides into a plastic consol which projects city streets on to the wall. You can drive virtual cars on them with controllers, but the action lasts only a second or two, because you have to keep shifting the slide, ala Viewmaster-style, to get to the next street image.
I’m kind of laughing at this because in the dream (and for real) I have an XBOX 360 and he’s playing with this “new” technology that wouldn’t even be able to compete with a 1976 Atari 2600. So I kind of shine him on and ask him what he’s been up to.
Then he pops through the garage door with a cell phone to his ear! He’s been in our house this whole time! He walks over to the front door and lets his wife in. She is carrying paper plates and Tupperware and stuff. I get furious and yell at him, asking him what he is doing and he replies all matter-of-fact that he just stopped by to see me and share some dinner. My wife and I start screaming at him about his audacity to come over unannounced and we shout at them to leave.
They leave, but my brother doesn’t seem to understand why I’m making such a big deal over it.
And I suppose that’s really how it is in the conscious world, too. All of these surrealistic scenarios are describing real life themes, whether actual or projected. Our hopes, desires, fears, and perceptions play out as abstract dramas within our sleep world and yet somehow we retain our balance over reality when we wake.
Or do we?
I’m a big believer that dreams have a tremendous amount of meaning to the self. I dream pretty vivid and strange and I would have to say the two dreams I’ve described here were rather plain fare, except they depict realistic events that have never happened and are likely to never happen. But the fact that I can describe them means that they did happen… in my head.
And the fact that they are tethered to the characteristics and psychological themes and perceptions existing in the waking world means that they have more substance than would appear. So I suppose that there is some credence to that age old saying: “Life is but a dream.”
