WHAT'S IN A DREAM?

There is just not much more boring than someone else’s dreams. Well, I do think that listening to genealogists telling about their ancestor runs it a close second, but that’s another topic. It is strange, I think, that we who dream and remember every jot and title about what happened in our dream are so enamored of them. Very honestly, no one cares about the little scenarios that play out in our busy brains.

It took me a while to figure that out. I am a dreamer and most of the dreams I remember are the ones that apparently happen just before I wake up (or are those that wake me up, being what I call my “disaster” dreams.) When Jerry and I decided to take a trip to Egypt and Israel in 1980, we embarked on a rigorous exercise schedule of getting up at 5 a.m. to walk a mile or so. (In our thinking, that was really rigorous). We wanted to be fit enough to climb to the top of the pyramids, so when the alarm went off at 5 a.m., we were out of the house so fast we almost took the bedcovers with us. But poor Jerry. At 4:59 a.m. every morning I was in the middle of some kind of dream and he had to spend his walking time listening to me report every detail about that dream. He was a good husband and did not tell me to shut up, but had I been able to see his eyeballs, I would have seen them rolling, for sure.

I don’t know when it was that I finally figured out my dreams weren’t all that exciting to anyone but me, and frankly, when I started to repeat them they sometimes seemed a little boring to me too. So for the most part I have shut up about them.

I don’t try to figure out what dreams mean. Sometimes there is an obvious Freudian content to them, but not all the time. In my dreams I fly a lot. I don’t flap my wings, but I do something comparable to the breast stroke to keep myself flying above the treetops and to dodge the power lines. There are certain houses that appear and reappear in my dreams. Some of those houses I can identify from my real life, others I know all the details about because I have spent so much time in them in my dreams.

In one dream there is a house with a basement, and in the 30 years or so I’ve been dreaming about this house the supports in the basement are getting so weak that I expect it to collapse at any time. One of my disaster dreams will be when that collapse finally happens.

Once I dreamed that I walked past a mirror and saw that I had long black hair. Now that dream was nothing more than wishful thinking, because as I age my hair gets grayer and grayer and thinner and thinner.

In most of my dreams my children are small. I also alternate husbands in my dreams. There’s just no accounting for what the mind shovels up for the next dream so I plead innocence.

I also believe that I can dream without falling asleep. I know. I know. I just think I am awake. But it seems like there is this area where I am lying in bed waiting to go to sleep and an unbidden scenario is, at the same time, playing out in my mind. That mostly happens when I try to eke in a little afternoon nap. I feel like I haven’t slept at all, but if that is so, why then do I dream?

I don’t ever sleepwalk. I think I’d rather fly at night than walk. It’s a little safer, unless my flying is to get away from something that appears to be not good for my wellbeing, like maybe a kidnapper. Then it goes from a happy flying dream to a disaster dream, and those I’m not so crazy about.

I try my best not to inflict my dreams upon Jerry, but once in a while I just can’t help doing it.

Like this morning.