I remember, back in the early days of blogging, back when my first computer was powered by a little steam engine, that bloggers often wrote about what they had dreamed.
I sometimes did.
Then that got old.
Also, it turned out that I might have interesting dreams, but they rarely are still there when I wake up.
Well.
A couple nights ago I had a vivid nightmare that someone had bought the wrong breakfast cereal.
It was just an image and an emotion. The image was this box of muesli. It looked wrong. There were too many puffs in it, for example. I do not like my muesli with puffs, or with chocolate. At the moment, it is hard to get muesli in Austria without puffs or chocolate, that may have been the source of the dream.
Or it may not. Who knows with dreams?
Anyway, in the dream, I removed the clear plastic liner from the box, with all the cereal in it, and double checked. But it was clearly full of puffs.
Someone had bought the wrong muesli.
I was filled with profound disappointment.
Then I woke up, as one sometimes does with nightmares, still saturated with the emotion.
Wow, I thought, that was some nightmare.
Once, I had a nightmare about a rock in a stream. A big, flat boulder about an inch under the surface, with the water flowing silently over it. At night. That one filled me with regret and guilt. Some terrible crime was buried beneath that rock.
I have never forgotten that one.
Obviously.
On the other hand, I once had a dream about trying to kill a guy who was absolutely impossible to kill. He kept fighting back, it was amazing. I was tussling with him in a friend’s basement while a couple friends watched television upstairs, so on top of everything else, I was trying to kill him quietly. For some reason, it was impossible to strangle him. He was about as strong as me and kept getting away. I finally stabbed him in the neck with a shard of window glass. I hit an artery, too, because the blood was squirting out real far. Unfortunately, I seemed to have only nicked the artery, because although the blood squirted out real far, it squirted in a real thin stream. It was taking forever for him to bleed to death.
In fact, he never bled to death in that dream. He just kept rassling with me.
Then I woke up, full of anger and frustration. Still, it wasn’t exactly a nightmare.
Dreams, aren’t they weird?
Where do they come from, I wonder.
A friend of mine has facebook posts about all these elaborate and varied dreams that he has and the he remembers. They are actually kind of interesting and often humorous (or he tells them humorously which is one of his talents), and although I know this guy pretty well, it’s so rare for someone to have such good recall of dreams, that I’m still not certain he doesn’t just make them up. Not that it really matters if he can tell them in a humorous way.
I read a book in which Karen Blixen, pen name Isak Dinesen, wrote about her life. (My favorite movie, “Out of Africa,” was about her life in Kenya). She said she always had wonderful dreams; this was a gift she shared with other family members. No matter what problems she had in her life, her dreams were always wonderful! It made me a little envious, as my dreams are only rarely pleasant, tend be unsettling and have an “otherworldly” quality about them. I dream about places that I recognize only in my dreams!
I’m on the fence about dreams. I used to have some decent nightmares that I thought were telling me something. Lately I rarely remember any. Once I woke myself up laughing out loud at something in a dream that wasn’t funny to my waking mind. I used to have dreams set in the same place all the time, an intersection in Seattle that doesn’t really exist, or an empty bordello made out of concrete that I am pretty sure doesn’t exist anywhere because it looks more like the reptile section of a zoo than what I imagine a bordello would look like.
I just remembered this. If I’m in a dream and there’s a noise (the noise is real, such as a car backfiring), I hear the noise in my dream, but interpret it as something different, such as a gunshot, and then notice that somebody has a gun. Very normal. But my father always said that if this happened to him, he would see the gun in the person’s hand *before* he heard the car backfire. I can only surmise that his brain rewound the scene and replayed it with the gun to give some context for the noise. Very weird!
Long time no comment! Thought this was the perfect place to mention the nightmare/dream I had the other night… that I had a fencepost-sized necrotic wound going into my abdomen and pelvis, eating away at the anterior pelvic bone… Hey – maybe I’ll blog about that in my super secret blog that no one knows about. ;) Glad you’re still around, Mig.
Me too!And likewise!