Sometimes, I have this dream where I am flying. When I first started doing it, I had the best kind of flight, superhero flight. I could just fly any direction, brake, stop, hover, full freedom of movement in every axis. Want to fly upside-down (feet above head) and backwards, just to see what it feels like? I have. It's funny.
At some point the flying started to change. It went from Super Man to Super Mario. If you know, you know - it was mostly feather powerup type flight, I needed a long windup to run to max speed and then I could ZOOOOOOM off at 45 degrees, and from there, I had to breathe just right and rock back and forth in looping curls. If I lost the timing, I would glide down and have to run up again.
But it wasn't just flying - dreamtime was for me the safest place, a universe to explore without the fear of failure or judgment. It was the ability to think and do and play without feeling accountable for the time. I had to sleep, after all, it's a biological imperative. It was my time alone, and to be able to do whatever I could imagine with that time was a gift to outweigh the demands of the waking world.
My dreams got shot off in the war. I quit dreaming when I was in it. I still don't dream when I'm in it. I mean, yes, sure, I understand that everyone dreams even if we don't recall, but if the me that wakes up in the morning doesn't even know it happened, then the me that wakes up in the morning is glad to simply say it never was.
When I came back, when I'm back, I don't like my dreams any more. I remember a specific conversation with a mind-groomer when I explained that I had become desensitized to my dreams and while I would classify most of them as "bad", I would not use the word "nightmare" to describe them, because to me, a nightmare was something that fucked me up in the morning.
She asked me to explain, so I did.
There's one where
i'm upset because i can't find the metal polish i thought i had, because when i pulled over to ask if the out-of-state plates needed some help cause their hazards were on, they explained that they were desperate for someone to help them polish up their son's chainmail, because he was going to be knighted at this weekend's renn faire/combat reenactment troupe and it was supposed to be a surprise, and they wanted him to look just so, so i went to grab the can of metal polish i keep in the truck toolbox and boy am i fucking rooting around in here, this fucker is gobbling me up like the shitter in trainspotting and i'm climbing out of the bed box now, metal polish in hand, i'm really clambering out this fucking thing is bigger than a coffin inside somehow, i'm climbing on all fours to exit the bed of the truck and when i get to the tailgate and swivel around to jump out i wipe my hands on my pants and realize i've got red paint all the fuck over my hands, and i'm mad because it means the red spraypaint got wedged again and dumped itself out all over the inside of the box, and i turn around to look and the bed of the truck is just full of fucking gore, it's not just blood but it's also not pieces of bodies or even meat, it's blood and some kind of muddy slurry that is made of 100% human being, i realize i'm kneeling in it, the tailgate is up and the bed is completely full of it and it's up to my chest, i'm fucking swimming in gore, the inside of the truck bed is so deep that i can't touch the bottom anymore and i'm trying to grab the edge of the truck bed to clamber out but i can't get a grip because i still have this fucking can of metal polish in my hands, and i'm trying to drop it and get out and i can feel the layer of liquefied human fat collecting at the top of the pool of it and the layer of fat is creeping up my neck, why the fuck can't i just grab the edge and get out, why can't i just
And that's just one specific version of this one I have a lot of variations on, that's a Drowning in Blood dream. Those don't really fuck me up in the morning, which I think is because I don't ever smell anything in my dreams. Drowning in Blood are actually sort of funny a lot of times if they're even novel enough to end up in my dream log.
Example: One time I went back to Bellevue, Nebraska because I heard that the IHOP I used to frequent had somehow found a way and the guts to put a smoking section back in. When I got to the line for the smoking section I waited and waited, but then once I got my big stack of pancakes and went to pick the syrup from the little assortment, no matter what the label said or the color of the lid was, they were all blood. They kept apologizing and bringing me fresh pancakes and different syrup, over and over, it was exasperating and I woke up hungry as a motherfucker.
That one's pretty fucking funny.
Anyway I told her about Drowning in Blood and My Gun Doesn't Work, and she asked me about an example of a nightmare that did bother me longer than usual during waking hours. So I told her about Crispy Critters.
The way that one goes is, I'll be going about some kind of other business, usually some kind of normal business (at least normal by dream logic), and I'll notice that someone is horrifically burned. Nobody else seems to notice. The person doesn't even seem to notice. But as I'm sitting on a park bench eating the new limited edition ice cream cone, a guy will walk by and he is literally cooked through, Texas BBQ style, from the waist down. He stops to tie his shoe and all the cooked meat on his leg will just slide down the bone and flop off the guy, chunks of melted nylon from his pants holding together the steaming flesh. Or I'm at my cousin's cat's baptism and I have to shake someone's charred black hand and the hand or even the limb just crumble to carbon dust in my hands, blackened halves of bone withdrawing with the rest of the arm and leaving the rest clinging to me, ash turned to mud with the sweat from my palms.
Crispy Critters normally gets me pretty bad.
I used to love dreaming. I had lucid dreams, and I explored ways to make them better and more frequent. I followed a whole regime of mindfulness training for several years, and I believe that the experiment did work. Unfortunately, lucid dreaming has been cut off from me for a long time, but I'm trying to get it back.
I have a lot of Lost in the Maze dreams, and those are the best ones for getting in some practice, if I can find the little hook that lets me become aware of the dream. They're usually slow and plodding, and full of the kinds of dreamworld irregularities that are good for the trained dreamer to catch and try to make an attempt at climbing up into full agency, and above that, the lucid state.
A few weeks ago, according to this entry from my dream log, I was Lost in the Maze - a housing development of identical little plastic houses - trying to find my way back to the highway. There were no street signs, and after dozens of turns, I decided that I would simply drive straight through until I hit the edge of the development and then use the maze rule (follow the left wall) to find one of the exits. As I drove and drove, I began to wonder how large it could possibly be, dozens and dozens of identical blocks as far as I could see behind and ahead and both ways down every intersection.
It occurred to me to check the odometer, but I couldn't read the numbers on the dashboard. Increasingly desperate and bewildered, I pulled over, walked across the lawn of the closest house, and clambered up the privacy fence and onto the roof, thinking to get a better look. When I got up there, I realized that the grid of slapdash three bedrooms stretched to the horizon in all directions, the sky a crystal dome above a world of cookie cutter American Dream.
Astonished, amazed, and thoroughly stumped, I spun around on my heels to try to get my bearings until I noticed that no matter what direction I faced, I could see no sun in the perfectly clear midday sky.
Something started to push through the Maze. Something I knew I should remember, something I had to try to remember. Something important. Something special.
It came to me suddenly. A thunderclap.
I felt my heels rising off of the roof, my chest going light as I began to rise into the sky, a whoop of joy as I decided to pull up to about a thousand AGL and go supersonic, and as I felt the very tips of my toes let go, the last faint scrape of rubber against the scabby asphalt sending an electric jolt of anticipation up the spine with a full-body shudder,
Awake.
Disappointed for a few moments in the dimmest light of the early morning as it soaked through the rubberized fabric shell of my rude little tent, but glad to have even been so close.
I listened to the morning rush of birds and beasts, and thought about getting up for coffee, and wrote it down in the log.