For years now I've regaled people with with tales -- and sometimes reenactments -- of my dreams. I tend to dream a lot, remember much of them, and even often force myself out of bed immediately upon waking to write down the details of a dream.
I'm tired of the dreams I've been having. As people who've heard about a dream or two of mine already know, they tend to be rather epic in a nonsensical sort of way. Whether I'm cruising around my hometown with Lauren Voss and Elijah Wood in a station wagon or riding mini-airplanes around a prehistoric seascape (complete with dinosaurs), my dreams are often busy as heck. It's exhausting. I can't say that I'm psyched that (a) my dreams are usually rather draining and (b) in them my life is frequently in peril.
It's not that I have a ton of bad dreams all the time. I mean, I've definitely been stabbed on a cruise ship, chased through my old middle school by a homicidal clown (this was probably due to the clown complex of the generation that watched the film version of Stephen King's It), and nearly eaten by crocodiles. A bunch of people know what happened in a dream that started with "I was lying in my bed in my apartment in Jersey City and then Nula comes in to wake me up" and ended with "Shut it off! Shut it off!!!" Then there was the time I was stuck in traffic on the way to beach and soldiers started vaporizing all the cars in front of me. Hang on, I might have that dream written down in an e-mail somewhere. YES!
Completely unedited from half-sleep on the morning of May 28, 2006:
So the dream started and it seemed like we were going on vacation. Think our post-finals trip to OBX. Initially it focused on this random girl who I don't know. I just saw her getting ready for the trip. So we're all driving in what seem like SUVs with trailers down this road and suddenly these large government-looking vehicles show up and block our way. There's a lot of us...picture a large-scale bumper-to-bumper situation -- it's not all law school people. People start getting out of their cars and one person - the initial random girl - actually gets shot by one of the government dudes. Then something weird starts happening. Way down in front, people start disintegrating. Like, what Phoenix does in X3. I start looking around but everyone's frozen. So I grab Charles (he is the easiest to drag along) and start running towards the side of the road. The only other person I remember seeing was Victor (also running). It's complete chaos as people are running and disintegrating. (It seems that the disintegration is being caused by these soldier dudes.) So I run (still with Charles) through a small bit of forest and it turns out that we're on a mountain. So we start climbing down. (I had significantly more upper body strength in my dream than I do in real life.) We just keep climbing down and I can hear shit still going crazy up and behind me. After what feels like forever of climbing, we get to the bottom which seems to be some family's backyard. They ask us who we are and I explain what was happening above. They immediately let us in.That should give you a fair idea of the complexity of my dreams. They're all like that. And it's getting tiring. Last night/this morning, I had a dream that it was the night before the bar exam and I hadn't studied. I was with a few of my friends at a diner of sorts hanging out with Professor Zubrow (who, in my dream, owned the diner) and everyone was talking about the exam. It suddenly occurred to me that it was the next day and that I hadn't prepared at all. What was interesting was that I was still in-dream when I realized that I had already taken and passed the bar. It was really weird. That's another thing that happens a lot in my dreams: I realize I'm dreaming and yet the dream doesn't end. I've had to snap myself out of a few dreams by actually shouting, which is less of a problem now that I live alone.
It takes me a little while to realize they're shady as hell because they won't let us use the phone or anything. Slowly other people start to show up at these people's large house (apparently the climbing down the mountain idea wasn't solely mine). And the family houses all of us. We're not held prisoner or anything. There's a whole town but something's wrong with the phones and things are just weird. None of our cell phones are working. The people I distinctly remember being there were Charles, Victor, Humann, Graham, Sparrow, Natalie, Voss, Rickel, and Reichs. And the weirdest thing was that Charisma Carpenter (aka Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Cordelia Chase) was also there. She was another student at the law school in my dream and it was totally normal for her to be with us. Anyway, so we're all trying to figure out what to do and how to contact anyone else. At dinner one night (they feed us, too) one of the little girls (the family has a few) mentions a computer. So I immediately inquire about it and the mother (who looks a lot like Mary Kay Place) and I get into an argument. Anyway, she finally hands it over (it's a laptop) but it won't let me access any websites. There seems to be no way to contact the outside world. A conversation with the little girl reveals that things aren't as they seem and that we're in danger. So we start organizing (because random people from our group start disappearing). We somehow manage to get guns (I love that we can't get a working phone, but a cache of weapons isn't a problem). I unfortunately woke up right when we were going to shoot our way out of town. It was going to be pretty cool.
It was a very talky dream with a lot of conversations about where we were. In a way, it almost had LOST-esque undertones. My favorite theories were that we were in a Truman Show-type place, that we were in a government experiment, or that we were being held hostage by some weird hillbillies. Not sure.
That reminds me of a time when I had a dream that I was running down a city street. I wasn't running from anything; I think I was looking for something. Anyway, I got to a corner and an old lady was walking her chihuahua. I tripped over the chihuahua, flew through the air, and woke up half on the floor. See? Dreaming is dangerous. I should get sedatives.
[NOTE: Edited to remove a certain friend's first name after entirely too many google searches for his entire name led here. It was sort of creepy. He's better off.]
No comments:
Post a Comment