I dream therefore I am

‘Dream Caused By The Flight Of A Bee’ by Salvador Dali, 1944

Some people have exotic dreams spawned by the inconsequential.  Dali painted this after a bee buzzed his ear while he was sleeping.  Mosquitos buzz my ear and the only dream I get is me waving my hand at it only it’s not going away because my hand is actually snuggled in my blanket as I am sleeping.

I dream.  Sometimes I’m better at remembering them than others.  I know writing them down would help considerably but so far I haven’t been able to engender the habit.  My dream life is not so fantastic as Dali’s but it is deep and rich.  Sometimes waking is like being pulled from one reality to another.  I remember, I remember and as I get nearer to waking I remember less of the details until at some critical moment I have crossed dimensions and I am now in this one.  I’m awake and the door to that other world is closed, gone.  Sometimes I can recall partial bits, sometimes enough to string along into a sort of beginning and end, an outline of the dream but lots of blank spaces.  Sometimes I can remember them in great detail.  

I have recurring themes like the ones where I dream I have to go to the bathroom and I’m searching for a toilet but every time I find one it’s not functioning or it is so disgustingly dirty I can’t bear to touch it or it’s in a deep dank basement or locker room or it’s so bizarre I can’t figure out how to make it work.  My subconscious knows no bounds to making them unusable.  It’s telling me to ‘wake up you eejit before you wet the bed!’  I figure if I found a working toilet, that that is exactly what I would do.  So now I have trained myself to just wake up instead of the incessant searching.

I also have the classic anxiety dreams of being late for the year end exam in a class that I’ve cut classes to all year, haven’t even cracked the book or read a single page and on top of that I don’t even know where the classroom is.  But at least I’ve got clothes on.  The last time I had a naked dream I and my companion were being chased and we took refuge amongst circus people because we felt we would be less conspicuous there, being naked and all.

Some of my favorites are the house dreams.  I love these, finding hidden rooms, finding whole new wings, sometimes coming upon a brand new house, exploring room after room with all the different contents.  One time I had a sex dream and a house dream combined, the house beckoned but I was with a really sexy guy who wasn’t exactly interested in exploring that house over there.  After a little enticing, neither was I.

And did I mention the sex dreams?  

I remember a dream fragment from many decades ago:  There is an endless row of artists of which I am one, painters, on the beach with their easels and brushes working away, they are swept away by a tsunami; artists, easels, canvasses tumbling submerged in the water.  But I am swimming hovering there breathing the water watching it all swirl by.

I have many fragments like that. 

Some whole dreams I have written down but they are long and this is too long already. 

I have quite a few dreams though that have me mystified.  Dreams that are so bizarre that it’s hard to make sense of them, dreams that are somewhat mundane but leave me feeling the same way.  A recent one...

There were some children in the house with water balloons.  One of them had a big balloon which I filled with water.  It was the size of a basketball, bigger.  Don’t throw those in the house, I tell them which of course, the words are no sooner out of my mouth than I am hit with the big one.  Water goes everywhere.  Gallons and gallons of water.  The children are put to the task of picking up all the wet stuff off the floor while I get a mop.  This mop has a head on it about 2” wide.  I’m horrified to see that the wood floor is starting to warp.  In the kitchen, I hear two people arguing about whose fault it was.  This really pisses me off so I go in there and yell at them to shut up and help...’it doesn’t matter whose fault it was’.  They grudgingly come in to help.  There is newspaper on the floor and when we pick it up we see that the newsprint has come off on the floor but it comes off with a little scrubbing.

Sometimes I am left wondering which is the real reality.