Weird, Weird Dreams
Last night I went to sleep quite early, around 9pm. Work’s been kinda drama-filled and exhausting (though good) recently and I just tuckered out way before my usual bedtime last night. Actually I’ve been meaning to get to sleep earlier, I just finally did it for once. And whoo but I’ll think twice before doing that again.
Even before I fell asleep my mind was wandering madly and I would get a spinning sensation when I closed my eyes - not quite dizziness, but more like a feeling of expansion. Have you ever looked up to see the clouds exploding? It felt like that, as if my mind were leaving my body, scattering in all directions. Some calm meditation took care of that. But then the dreams began, and they went all night. I remember them all (it’s rare these days for me to remember any) and they all woke me up eventually, some in complete terror.
I recall one that concerned the area around the Emeryville marina. In my dream it was a semi-occupied apartment tower district, half-empty, a little dangerous, but sleepy and more or less fun to run amok in by night. My friends and I did just that, through surrounding parks, up and down stairwells, across wasted stretches of unruly bushes. Something about it reminded me of another dream I once had, of driving for hours across bridge after bridge stretching between island after island. The bridges were all huge and chock full of urban traffic, much like the way between the East Bay across Treasure Island into San Francisco, but even bigger than the Bay Bridge. And they went on forever, spanning dozens of islands completely urbanized to a Manhattan degree. Spanning down into one was like landing a plane. And actual air traffic teemed overhead.
But back to last night - the next dream had me lying in bed, in the dark, under the covers, next to an ex-girlfriend. We were talking about where we’ve been, what we’ve been doing, who we’ve been seeing, just like we’d probably do now if we got together for coffee and a bit of catch-up. But the setting of the dream was more like settling down for a night’s sleep together, and I thought to myself several times that perhaps I’d better steer the conversation to an end, because it was wandering into more sensitive territory and it was really time to close our eyes and get some sleep. WTF? Why do dreams always seem logical, even when they’re clearly whacked? Apparently our rational mind sleeps as soundly as our arms and legs, only twitching briefly here and there in numb abjection.
On to the next dream, wherein I attended a backyard barbecue with family and friends. One of my little cousins was there, a fellow I am always happy to see in waking life, but who, in the dream, had regressed to about 10 years old and gone zitty and snotty and slobbery as well. He was telling me a story, his face smeared with pesto, when, without warning, he suddenly kicked me in the balls with his undersized sneaker. I wasn’t immediately crippled, though I do remember feeling pain, and I pounced on him immediately, grabbing him by the neck. I slammed his head back down into a muddy puddle behind him, oddly measuring my words as I told him “That is not acceptable behavior. People are not going to let you do things like that, okay?” And as I looked down at his terrified face (which was encircled, nearly submerged in the muddy puddle) I kept thinking: his ears are underwater. He can’t hear me.
Another dream wound through and around my grandparents’ home and property. It’s nice there by day, sunny, green, and surrounded by trees and open land. But by night it’s dead quiet & pitch dark, which still creeps me out a little bit, being a city kid. Anyway, it was night, I was sleeping in one of the twin beds in the guest room there, and the door opened. A figure walked briskly in, making no effort to keep quiet and avoid waking me. It was a woman’s figure, relatively short and slight, and dressed from head to toe in white. Her attire matched a nun’s habit in every way, except for being completely white, and except for the fact that it also completely covered her face, form-fitting to the jut of her nose and chin with the same starchy fabric as the rest of it. She was a priestess and a mummy, a mother superior and a bandaged corpse. Her movements were economical, quick, without flourish, without malice, without feeling. She knelt swiftly by the side of the bed, blocking out the warm yellow light of the plug-in night-light, and fiddled with some kind of apparatus in her hands.
I was awake and aware of her presence but groggy and not comprehending. The thought that someone was dressing up to play a joke on me seemed the most likely explanation, and in my conscious mind I was determined to make a cool, unfrightened proclamation like “come on, I’m trying to sleep here” before the intruder could get a moment’s satisfaction out of the joke. But then the figure put her hands over my body, down near my stomach, and I heard a faint buzzing sound, like electricity flooding a dynamo, and my bedclothes began to crackle and bristle, drawn into a bunch over my belly as if pulled up into her hands. I realized too late that she’d moved quickly because stealth was not her game - whatever she was doing was quick enough and deadly enough to work in less time than I could react. She stared blankly at the wall behind the headboard, head unmoving and uninterested as I felt my neck compress backward and my back arch. I was caught in the bedclothes and being sucked upward with them. The sickening sense of leaving my body returned and I realized that I had better say something now or it would be too late. But my voice stuck in my throat. I was completely paralyzed. I strained and tried, but I couldn’t make more than a whisper of a grunt come out, as she knelt there calmly and deliberately sucking my life away, until I woke up, sitting straight up and gasping “GAH!” just like they always do in the movies.
At that point it was 6am and the sun would begin to come out soon. I should have been well-rested, given when I went to sleep, but I’d been waking up every few hours all night and I had a cramp in my stomach as if I hadn’t eaten the night before. Thoughts of work and waking life crept in, and thoughts of all the wonderful carnal sustenances waking life provides: coffee, sex, food at some point. Those desires were mercifully distracting and warm. They reminded me where my body was.
6am and the thought of getting up to enjoy a leisurely breakfast and a head start on the day actually seemed sane after that kind of night. Clearly, I’d been driven mad.