THREE DREAMS
3 stories from “second sleep” dreams:
1. The apartment dream, which often recurs. It is always related to a university, maybe student housing, but I’m a late life student and no other students are around. I’m just finding my room. This time I had a friend with me, maybe a little group, who had helped me bring my things. The floors were broad and shiny wood extendiing through several rooms joined by an arch. Big windows stream with sun. Mainly they look out at the campus and other buildings which were a generic mix of several campuses. A door at one end — maybe a double door, opened out onto a small balcony that looked down at woods, a pleasant park-like place. I was very pleased but also concerned that I wasn’t sure I had brought my brass bed, a bed I had really had years ago. I had borrowed my mother’s old van and needed to return it.
2. I was mailing something fragile and small in a bulky package and a man was accepting postal packages. I also had an assortment of small pieces of plywood. I was in Cuba and driving one of those big old unwieldy cars with fins. The package man was in a storefront, with a glass wicket. I tried to be friendly but he was very big and angry. He didn’t like my packing and dumped out the small fragile glass piece. It didn’t break and I put it back. I looked at him with an open face and for a moment he became curious and looked back openly. Then he went dark and angry again. Trying to be polite, I said, “Does “das ve danya” mean thank you? He became angrier and said NO.
The storefront was also a bridal shop for used wedding dresses and there was a line of women carrying dirty, torn white dresses, long-skirted. The owner of the shop, an older big-bellied man kept complaining that there was no market for such things and that he had no money.
I was very tired and went back to the old car, put in my package and the plywood and got in to nap.
3. It was a place of war like Afghanistan and I was with a very small group as “signal corps” or some other intelligence group. We were in a vineyard going down rows and then in a broad area going from one piled up box of big mortar shells and boxes to another. The small group encountered a larger, more formal group that considered itself more important but was doing the same kind of work. To prove our effectiveness, I accumulated intelligence on them and presented it to them. Their lead man was an actor from last night’s movie who reminds me of Kris at AC, a man who was effective in a kind of blunt way. Didn’t really grasp subleties. Was not impressed by me. Waved away my information.
ANALYSIS:
I take these dreams to be access to my thinking in daily reality, but reframed and reworked into stories, which would be something I do in real life as well, but with more intention and for a purpose. These three were interesting because they were what my life was like in memory in three different stages.
The first is a depiction of university, especially U of Chicago/Meadville where somehow I was assigned a “mother-in-law” suite at the back of a big old house. It was big, sunny and private but not a dorm building, which it often is in the dream. Still, it felt like this dream does. It was a happy, optimistic time. Sometimes there are scenes in a professor’s office which is always like something out of “Morse,” the series in Oxford. Many books. The prof is most often like Richard Stern, very accepting.
The second might be from the Nineties when I was working in the Portlandia Building and there were often many Latino people in the streets downtown in gangs about the time we went went home. But the dream didn’t look like Portland, except for trying to get small tasks done while people were cranky and reluctant. The bridal shop stands for my marriage that didn’t work but also refers to a minister who came to Valier from running a bridal shop. She ran the church like a bridal shop, very concerned with business and wanting to get rid of all the “clutter” which was really memorials and gifts.
The third dream was partly from movies and partly an impression of the times we are in now. I had just written a blog about having to run from hostile forces or other catastrophe. Kris, the officer, looked good and seemed to do the right thing, but never seemed to quite “get it.” He was exasperating because he was so conventional.
Narrative dreams like these are said to be order-making and house-cleaning, organizing and making space. It took considerable effort to remember these, except that the first one comes back often. Both times in university were very happy, though it was unusual to have a pleasant apartment or even to have my own furniture.
Worked into a plot, these dreams could give access to writing novels. They are all urban, if small-town, though I’ve thought a lot about the rural and the “wilderness”. The closest I’ve come in this set is the balcony looking down at the woods, which in European films are often places that represent danger and mystery more than in the US where stories are more likely to be about strong individuals who are at home in the forest, but not tribal like indigenous people. “Wilderness” is seen in America as benign and embracing, bountiful and inspiring. Other cultures are more guarded. I’m ambiguous.
These night-time systems and stories have no relationship at all to Freud. No sex in any of them, but pesky authorities who are adult or powerful or privileged. I never have that status myself in dreams. If someone else, maybe a well-trained psychoanalyst, were to interpret these dreams, they would need me to be present as the key or they would simply project their own lives into mine. But if they read a lot of my writing, they could make guesses. Isn’t that what we do with published books?
