Last night I dreamed I was with a group of people I didn’t know so of course I kept to myself. We were in an airport waiting to fly to Russia to go skiing. I became aware of the dream when we were on a tarmac, then suddenly inside on a series of stairwells zigzagging down to a floor that was built into a cliff. The Russia gate was stuffed into a corner, with the rock face forming one wall of the waiting area, dark seawater lapping alongside about 20 feet below.
There was a single person at the gate desk and a tiny flight destination sign that read, “Russia.” I guess there’s a Moscow, Idaho, so maybe there’s a Russia somewhere that’s not the gigantic Slavic landmass, but that’s where we were headed to ski. All of our bags were piled in front of the desk. Everyone else had wandered off because of course there was a wait time of eternity.
Now here’s a funny thing about dreams—orientation. Facing the tiny gate desk, the rock wall and the sea below was to my right. The gate sign was straight ahead at the end of the tiny chairless waiting area. Behind me was something of no consequence so it didn’t register. To my left was a narrow set of stairs covered in old but clean red and gold carpet. About halfway down the stairs was a small landing on either side, maybe four square feet. The right side was a waiting area for a tiny Irish pub on the left, behind and down a few more steps from a red-headed hostess at a podium who turned around to see if there was room for one more after she told me that, yes, they served wine, even though I didn’t ask.
Dreams are sort of the SETI@home version of what our minds do with the data overload of our waking hours. If I were to interpret that dream, I’d have to say how unusual it seemed to find wine at an Irish pub.
Lucid dreams are apparently going around, according to a search of headlines with the word “dreams” in it. “Coronavirus Dreams Are Taking Over the Internet.” “Vivid Dreams During Lockdown? Here’s What They Mean.” “The Pandemic is Giving People Vivid, Unusual Dreams. Here’s Why,” etcetera, yada and so forth. I really don’t need Wired, Cosmo or National Geographic to tell me what my dreams mean. I’m 59 years old. Lucid dreams usually mean I ate too close to bedtime.
I’ve had lucid dreams as long as I can remember, just not consistently. There are long periods of time when I have no dreams at all. I sleep, I wake up, that’s that. Other times, it’s like a picture show in there.
One of my earliest lucid dreams I had again and again while I was growing up on the farm where I was not exactly welcome. The waking world was a harsh, cold, rundown and isolated place. In the dream, the cornfield by the house was instead a magical sunken garden with marble columns covered in fragrant blooming vines and surrounded by lush vegetation, in a kind of never-ending night day, where I wore a white gauze gown, with birds and animals all around, but never people, pain or humiliation. I went to that garden night after night.
Later, there would be falling dreams, but not for long. I’d read somewhere about how to control the outcome of falling dreams, so I never fell to the ground, and soon came the flying dreams. These were far more realistic than the falling dreams. They were so realistic, they were somatic. I can to this day still sense what it felt like to fly, probably because I flew in an apparatus—something like a hang glider that I sat in. It had more of an acrobatic parachute than a gull wing. I floated silently along the treetops nearly every night for a while. It seemed like the most normal thing on earth, or off it as the case may be. I miss the flying dreams. At least I had them.
Then there was this one-timer that I’ll always remember, when I was in a bed surrounded by water. Big, dark blue water, like a very calm sea. There was a narrow walkway out to the bed from somewhere not visible in the dream, just at water level, as was the bottom of the bed. There were two things that I knew during that dream without knowing why I knew them. I wasn’t alarmed by the water, and it had something to do with my dad. Let the armchair analysis begin. That’s something I used to do, too, so I’m sure I deserve it. I quit because it’s mean and says more about the person doing it.
Like when a trained psychologist diagnoses you in a social setting in a condescending but straight-faced way, as if all of humanity isn’t stark-raving mad, even though we poop in our drinking water. I digress, because we’re talking about dreams here and dreams are the quintessential digression. Maybe they’re even little acts of rebellion when our minds are just sick of trying to make sense of things that will never make sense no matter how smart we think we are or what phantasms we make up to explain the inexplicable. That’s why I like the part in the Bhagavad Gita where Arjuna asks Krishna to reveal his eternal form and still goes into a blithering dither even after Krishna outfits him with bionic eyes. To me, anything that poops in one of the single most imperative substrates for its own survival has no business trying to interpret dreams, much less comprehend eternity.
There are some dreams that make sense, though. Maybe not right away, but eventually. Twenty years ago, I used to have these dreams that were more like hallucinations. I lived and worked in Washington, D.C., so maybe that explains it. I would be in that place right between sleep and wakefulness. I could “see” the whole room around me, even though I could not open my eyes or move my body. I’d be laying this way on my back when a cat would come up and lay down on my chest. Just cruise on up and park on my front side. We didn’t have a cat. I couldn’t open my eyes and see the cat. I would strain to wake up in time to see the cat that was never there when I finally woke up.
Twenty years later and a continent away, he’s there nearly every morning around 4 a.m., two inches away from my face purring like an outboard motor. Was I dreaming of my future? Who’s to say an unborn cat spirit wasn’t there to say, “You’re with the wrong guy. You are destined to meet my manservant so you can get up at 4 a.m. 20 years from now and get my treats from the pantry because he sleeps like a hunk of stone.” Time bends, after all. It stretches, distorts and waves and wrinkles, especially when the stuff we mark it with goes away. The more immediate past can recede farther away than the long-gone past, or all of it can seem like it a lucid dream.
Maybe dreams represent our actual existence, and wakefulness a somnambulistic illusion. Maybe I’m on my way to a Russian ski resort after having a glass of wine in an Irish pub off the narrow stairway of a vertical airport on the side of an ocean cliff. Maybe I’m dreaming about sitting here at the computer while the cat manservant watches his highlight reel downstairs and the wind blows the last vestige of the winter out of the desert valley. It’s not at all a bad dream, as dreams go, but I have a favorite dream that’s not at all my own. It goes like this:
“Last night I had the strangest dream
I'd ever dreamed before
I dreamed the world had all agreed
To put an end to war.
“I dreamed I saw a mighty room
A room was full of men
And the paper they were signing said
They'd never fight again.
“And when the paper was all signed
And a million copies made
They all joined hands and bowed their heads
And grateful prayers were prayed.
“And the people in the streets below
Were dancing 'round and 'round
And swords and guns and uniforms
Were scattered on the ground.
“Last night I had the strangest dream
I'd never dreamed before
I dreamed the world had all agreed
To put an end to war.” ~ “The Strangest Dream,” by Ed McCurdy.
Dream on, good people. Dream on.
I love the image of the cornfield becoming the welcoming place for you. That's just beautiful. Beautiful writing - and dreaming.
Always flying when I was growing up. And ice skating like Peggy Fleming. I do not have the flying dreams anymore. But I still have dreams about ice-skating fantastically. I guess my feet are on the ground and my high flying dreams are gone? In high school we had to write an end of semester presentation and oratory that we gave in front of the class. Mine was on dreams and I had researched it for a semester. Of course, dreams are all symbolic, I believe. My teacher nearly fainted when I told the class if you dream about a snake you were dreaming about sex. Oops.
I still got an A. Snap!