Frost and dreams
Jan. 20th, 2006 09:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hrjFor us wimpy Californians, it's being cold these days. I had to scrape ice off all the car windows this morning, and it seems like I've had to do that more than usual this year. I'm not feeling the cold much, though, even though I never have gotten around to getting someone in to look at the heater. At night I have my electric mattress pad. In the evenings I change into the fleece sweats after my shower. And on weekends, I have a fire in the stove. (And the cat has her little heated pad as well, which she's quite fond of.)
I had one of those weird vivid dreams last night -- probably compounded by a touch of sleep paralysis. I and a couple of (unspecified) friends were sleeping around a dying campfire in the middle of a large open plain. I kept struggling to stay awake because there were lions and wild dogs prowling around, but I couldn't keep my eyes open. Every time I'd pry my eyelids open, there would be a creature snuffling at me and I'd try to wave a wooden stick at them to keep them away, but my arms wouldn't work properly either. And then my eyes would close again ....
I'm always fascinated by "meaningful" dreams. I'm not talking about mystical dream interpretation, but dreams that are part of each individual's internal vocabulary. Like, any time I'm about to make a major trip -- especially if I'm not feeling on top of the planning -- I'll dream about having to catch an airplane, but it's taking off in ten minutes and I'm an hour's drive away and my passport is still at home.
That one's pretty straightforward, but I have a couple of standard anxiety dreams that seem rather macabre unless you know the specific background they came out of. The dream that means "there's some task you aren't taking care of and the longer you wait the worse it gets" involves wading ankle-deep through a sea of rotting body parts. But you see, this originally comes from cleaning the cages at the U.C. Davis bird of prey center. You'd be raking out several days worth of uneaten rat and/or baby chick carcasses, along with bird feces and hawked up furballs of undigestible parts. So "wading through rotting body parts" is really just "you haven't cleaned the cages recently".
The slightly more emphatic version -- more like "there's some task you never took care of and you forgot about it entirely but it still needs to get done and to do that you have to face the fact that you never did it in the first place" -- that one involves ever-increasing efforts to conceal a body. It generally starts out with me doing some sort of excavation for skeletons. This is part of the real-world grounding of the dream. Back in my teens I use to do skeletal preparations, of road kill, generally by burying them in a corner of the yard and then digging them up a month or so later. So in my dream, I'm either re-digging up a skeletal prep or maybe I'm out in the desert just randomly digging up a skeleton. And then I come across a human body in my dig. It may be fresh or it may be reduced to bones. And I'm afraid to report it, thinking I'll be implicated somehow, so I just re-fill the dig. But some clue has been left that connects me with the dig. And later I find myself going through all sorts of trouble to divert attention from the clue, or to try to dig up the body again and conceal it better (e.g., put it under the level of my original road kill so I can claim I never got that deep) because now I can't confess that I knew about the body all along because why didn't I report it?
Actually, I haven't had any of the standard anxiety dreams in years. Maybe I've gotten better at preventing the triggers, or maybe I'm in the process of developing a new dream vocabulary. Quite some years ago I had a standard anxiety dream about flying (self-powered, flapping arms) in a thick fog in a neighborhood with lots of overhead power lines. And if I could get high enough, I'd come out of the fog and get above the power lines, but in the mean time I'm flapping and flapping (well, actually, dream-flying was an awful lot like swimming underwater -- more of a scissor-kick and breast stroke) and dodging wires that come out of nowhere. I don't think I've had that one in a couple of decades.
Anyone else have "stock" dreams that are really your subconcious sending you e-mail reminders?
I had one of those weird vivid dreams last night -- probably compounded by a touch of sleep paralysis. I and a couple of (unspecified) friends were sleeping around a dying campfire in the middle of a large open plain. I kept struggling to stay awake because there were lions and wild dogs prowling around, but I couldn't keep my eyes open. Every time I'd pry my eyelids open, there would be a creature snuffling at me and I'd try to wave a wooden stick at them to keep them away, but my arms wouldn't work properly either. And then my eyes would close again ....
I'm always fascinated by "meaningful" dreams. I'm not talking about mystical dream interpretation, but dreams that are part of each individual's internal vocabulary. Like, any time I'm about to make a major trip -- especially if I'm not feeling on top of the planning -- I'll dream about having to catch an airplane, but it's taking off in ten minutes and I'm an hour's drive away and my passport is still at home.
That one's pretty straightforward, but I have a couple of standard anxiety dreams that seem rather macabre unless you know the specific background they came out of. The dream that means "there's some task you aren't taking care of and the longer you wait the worse it gets" involves wading ankle-deep through a sea of rotting body parts. But you see, this originally comes from cleaning the cages at the U.C. Davis bird of prey center. You'd be raking out several days worth of uneaten rat and/or baby chick carcasses, along with bird feces and hawked up furballs of undigestible parts. So "wading through rotting body parts" is really just "you haven't cleaned the cages recently".
The slightly more emphatic version -- more like "there's some task you never took care of and you forgot about it entirely but it still needs to get done and to do that you have to face the fact that you never did it in the first place" -- that one involves ever-increasing efforts to conceal a body. It generally starts out with me doing some sort of excavation for skeletons. This is part of the real-world grounding of the dream. Back in my teens I use to do skeletal preparations, of road kill, generally by burying them in a corner of the yard and then digging them up a month or so later. So in my dream, I'm either re-digging up a skeletal prep or maybe I'm out in the desert just randomly digging up a skeleton. And then I come across a human body in my dig. It may be fresh or it may be reduced to bones. And I'm afraid to report it, thinking I'll be implicated somehow, so I just re-fill the dig. But some clue has been left that connects me with the dig. And later I find myself going through all sorts of trouble to divert attention from the clue, or to try to dig up the body again and conceal it better (e.g., put it under the level of my original road kill so I can claim I never got that deep) because now I can't confess that I knew about the body all along because why didn't I report it?
Actually, I haven't had any of the standard anxiety dreams in years. Maybe I've gotten better at preventing the triggers, or maybe I'm in the process of developing a new dream vocabulary. Quite some years ago I had a standard anxiety dream about flying (self-powered, flapping arms) in a thick fog in a neighborhood with lots of overhead power lines. And if I could get high enough, I'd come out of the fog and get above the power lines, but in the mean time I'm flapping and flapping (well, actually, dream-flying was an awful lot like swimming underwater -- more of a scissor-kick and breast stroke) and dodging wires that come out of nowhere. I don't think I've had that one in a couple of decades.
Anyone else have "stock" dreams that are really your subconcious sending you e-mail reminders?
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Date: 2006-01-22 06:47 pm (UTC)I also have "someone's missing and I have to find them before they die" dreams, which usually mean I need to call/write/spend more time with that person. Since my brother's unexpected death last summer, I've discovered a new "stock" dream - a progression of the (gajillion more than 7 or 9) stages of grief that causes the dream to be like a serial that I get to watch portions of in reruns until I've managed to come to some terms with wherever I am in that process.