10/11/01

The invisible line between dreams and reality

I have always been a creature of my dreams. Fascinated by them, inspired by them, most of the stories I pursue in my waking hours have their roots in my nocturnal visions.

Is it strange that sometimes I get confused between what had happened in my dreams and what has happened in my life? Is it strange that half the time I don't even dream of myself?

Most people do, you know, dream of themselves, but when I dream in the first person, sometimes that person isn't me. More often I dream in the third person, where it's like watching a movie, a really engrossing movie. Have you ever fused with the television, so that your emotions are those of the character on the screen? This happened to me once, when I wasn't paying attention, and it was the creepiest thing I have ever experienced. A sort of wild empathy, and she was frightened, and I panicked.

Why this all comes up, is that I was reading this romance novel (of course) but one the other hand I was looking at the damn MSN news page one gets when one signs out of hotmail (not to sound too paranoid, but you should always sign out of your passport after you're done with your mail, or otherwise they'll track your process around the net, and decide what you are, and one day I'm gonna tell you all how sick I am of Amazon thinking they know me, because they think I'm a pregnant, soppy woman with a preschool aged kid who listens exclusively to whiny folk music and plays video games, and that's wildly inaccurate, but I admit to the soppiness) and they had this article about nightmares and how they are a way the mind deals with traumatic events.

And that if you wake up remembering nightmares more than twice a year, it's not exactly normal.

I wake up remembering nightmares about once a month. I get migraines twice a year. But I think I'm in the practise of remembering my dreams. Maybe that's the difference. I remember having lots of nightmares as a child (maybe not lots, but some) one in particular, where a man in a military uniform was taking me away from my parents in the middle of the night, they couldn't do anything to stop it, and I was crying so hard, and with my little arms around his neck, I managed to break off his head, and as it fell, its teeth grazed me back… That's where it sticks in my memory, the teeth. And then of course, the general things, earthquakes, standing on the edges of cliffs when they collapse, although I didn't fall, one of my sisters or parents would slip out of sight.

And then for awhile, the world was still. And my dreams though occasionally violent, where the baseline violence, or maybe I've blocked it out of my memory. Or maybe this is where my dreams got less personal.

In my junior year of college, I took a class, crosslisted Women's Studies, Asian Studies, and History, about the nuclear bomb and its effect on the cultures of the US and on Japan. Don't ask me about the Women's Studies angle, it never made much sense to me, but in reading poetry, novels, testimonials, listening to lectures, this class had the greatest impact on me than any other class I have ever taken. It brought back the nightmares that had vanished from my subconsciousness. Nightmares where the world is covered with fine radioactive dust, where bright lights flash me awake.

The first of these, I would also like to mention in greater detail, for it has achieved a distinction no other dream has in my life, for it was named ("The Lucy Narratives" after one of the children in the Narnia books, because it also involved a strange new world and street lamp). A young girl was the lone survivor of nuclear holocaust, because she was picked up by a spaceship, which took her to a nightclub, and when she went into the bathroom there, there was a line of girls, all deformed in some way, fixing their make up in front of the mirror, and one of them had a tattoo across her face that said "Losla" (I think) which I believe was meant to refer to Los Alamos. And after the party, the girl was taken back to Earth when the threat of radiation was gone and dropped off at a crossroads with a single street light, and all the world was dark and flat, and the roads led off into nothing.

It's grown to a larger mythology, one of my endless parade of characters is a novelist, and one of the books he wrote was called "The Lucy Narratives." And, of course I made a mix tape, songs about death and the end of the world and how we can't just abandon our fellow man, and the tape case is decorated with the same light that is in the "There is a light and it never goes out" logo. It's all connected somehow.

One of the ways they tell you to deal with nightmares is to, when you're awake, to brainstorm ways to change the outcome of the dream. Or end the dream, since you usually aren't in it till the end. But when it starts with the end of the world, where do you go from there?

But what's really been bothering me is that three nights ago, I had the strangest dream of my life, for it was a parable, a fable. It was Disneyland, but not the real Disneyland, but the theme park that ate America, if you will, an occasional obsession of mine, what happens when the earth becomes so franchised… and there was this great alabaster statue (really a great head) that stood on a picturesque clifftop, and on this statue, an eagle had her nest. And she thought of the statue first as a home, then later as the protector of her two hatchlings, and finally as a god to be worshipped. Or as God. But one day God came by, a worn looking man in a trenchcoat, and he paused by a park bench, and as he looked out over the cliff and the ocean beyond it, the statue fell into the sea, carrying the eagle with it, and God asked the eagle, who had died, of course, why she had tied her emotions to the statue, because He had made her strong enough to withstand the impact of a small car, and somehow this implies that had she had faith in Him, she wouldn't have perished with the statue…

It was a sad little dream, but also, it was on reflection a bit alarming. I realize writing this out that many of you have no idea where my views on religion are, and therefore don't know how to look at this. I was raised "United Church of Christ" meaning, almost a Unitarian. But really, I'm fairly ambivolent about the whole thing, sometimes I wish I had more faith, sometimes I wish I had less. But for a basically atheist young lady like me to have a quiet parable whispered to her as she slept is a fairly unsettling notion.

But I've always had this implicit faith in my dreams. And the message in this one is so clear, (once one figures out what the statue is to represent) I don't think I can dismiss it easily.

One last dream. When the Boyfriend and I were getting together, actually, on a day between the moment I let him know I was interested and the moment he said, yeah, so was he, I had a dream about being in high school, and taking a field trip to some forest, where a deposed queen (named Christy, by the by) was running around trying to amass an army for a revolution, but she saved me from being enchanted (of course, there's a wicked witch somewhere) and told me that the witch was trying to trap my classmates and so I went to find them, but it was too late for most of them (including Leslie, actually, and though Christy gave me a cure for her, I failed to convince her to use it). But I found my nearly Boyfriend still untouched, though dangerously begging for something sugary from some suspicious people, and I hauled him away, and gave him a kiss and a pixie stick. Then we watched the war of the dinosaurs (not kidding, I looked it up in my journal) and talked about politics in that muddy fairytale land.

Maybe that's a metaphor too, since he's had occasion to whine about how protective I am of him, not letting him put scissors in his mouth, walk on railroad tracks, and so forth, but according to my dreams, I started out protecting him.

And he does read what I write.

Kisses,

Cecily
AIM: astormorray

we opened the window, played some nintendo.