I swear, if I don't have the bat-sh*t-craziest dreams on the planet, I seriously don't want to be inside the mind the does! Hi, everybody, by the way! How ya been? Want to hear all about my crazy dreams? Fix yourself a cup of coffee and a schnack and pull up a chair - it's going to be a good long visit!
...................ready?
Ok, great. What do you already know about my dream state? Because I've been a crazy dreamer for as long as I can remember. Did I ever tell you about the dream that I (must have) had as a very young child, which I grew up believing to be an actual memory?
It must've been before my brother was born (or so I would assume, since he didn't appear in the dream, and based on my own recollections of myself, I would estimate my age to be about 3 years old). I had a memory of myself and my family - my parents, my sister and my grandparents - at a park on a picnic. The grown-ups were sitting in lawn chairs chatting while my sister and I ambled around the park. Very near where the big people were sitting was a...stream? brook?...a small-ish, flowing body of water with a small wooden bridge over it. A single plank in the bridge was missing and I fell through and got stuck at arm-pit level.
And nobody made came to save me!
My sister knelt down beside me and assured me that help was on the way, but my parents and grandparents just sat there and chatted merrily, as if there was nothing at all wrong with their three year old dangling from a bridge. At one point, my grandfather even turned around in his chair and said, "Don't worry, Baby, we'll get you out." or perhaps it was, "Don't worry, Baby, help is coming."
Anyhow, I don't remember how old I was when I realized this had to have been a dream, and I only became aware of it when I asked my sister about the outing and she (must have thought I was crazy, but also..) told me that such a thing had never happened.
So, you see, my brain has been quite out of whack from a very young age, if not since birth or earlier. I mean, that's a very explicit dream for such a young child, and also, why I wouldn't I have been dreaming about new toys and ponies, like any other three year old? Wait, what DO three year olds dream about, anyway? Who's got a three year old? I don't recall my three year olds telling me about their dreams, unless they were totally making stuff up! (Which they did, and sometimes still do, so I have to wonder if my kids' brains aren't operating on some totally different frequency from mine...anyway!)
Then, when I was much older (9-ish? I think...) there was the dream that my dad had bought me a Nintendo game that I really wanted. When I woke up, I thought it had been real and spent probably a good half-hour looking for the game and becoming increasingly upset that I couldn't find it. Ok, I know that this isn't altogether uncommon, but I have to wonder...if my nine year old mind was dreaming about a video game, what could have possibly prompted my three year old mind to fear being left dangling off a bridge? Especially while I was still the baby the family - the four adults who failed to render aid in my dream were the four people in the entire world least likely to leave me hanging (pun intended) in an emergency situation. Hmm...Mom? Maybe this was a pre-new-baby anxiety dream? In retrospect....
Anyhow, moving on. So, my dreams have always been vivid, way out in left-field (or is right-brain?), and sometimes frightening. No wait, strike that. Make that "often". And I can't help but figure that my dream-atmosphere was fostered my mom's encouragement of dream interpretation. When I was a kid, many was the morning spent hashing out dreams and their meanings with my mom, and even looking them up in her battered copy of 10,000 Dreams Interpreted. No, really - look:
See? Ok, granted, THIS picture is of my grandmother's copy, but it's the same one my mom had and it just goes to show that...1) my crazy-dream-ishness did in fact come from somewhere, and 2)...well, I forgot what else, but there was something!
And none of this even touches on the recurring dreams or the cat dreams - (shudder!) I still remember that one with the cats and the field and the abandoned house and running, running, the cats the are chasing me, trying to claw at me, yeesh!! I think that one might have been high-school-ish. I don't remember the whole dream anymore, but those images are still bold in my mind - especially the colors; the bright greens and golds of the long grass in the field, the dusty gray of the gravel driveway leading up to the faded white paint of the dilapidated old house, and the clear, blue sky and crayon-orange fluff of those damn kittens!
So, if I haven't managed to convince you that my dreams are insane and surreal and daytime-soap-opera addictively interesting, well, feel free to not read on and find out what I dreamed last night. Because it was an insane one. And you know how sometimes when you wake up, you don't remember the whole dream? And how sometimes, you never do remember it, but sometimes the more you stew over it, the more and more and more details you recall? This one was a more and more and more kind of dream. When I woke up, still half-asleep and could have easily gone back to sleep if I had let myself, all I could recall was one of the last parts of my dream; which was a certain friend (who shall remain nameless) telling me that I had "@$$ breath" (by the way, I woke up cotton-mouth-thirsty as all get-out and not so fresh, so....).
But the more I thought it over, the more I recalled, and, as far as I can remember, the dream started with me walking along the highway, in the middle of the more or less empty road (not sure if I had abandoned a broken-down car, but there was kind of a feeling...), gray messenger bag slung across my back (in fact, I recall doing the slinging as I was walking), and up ahead I could see two things: a police officer pulling over a car (white?) and, further up the road, another police officer standing in the grass along the side of the highway, both watching out for his partner and watching for traffic violators. I quickly made my way over to the shoulder, so as not to get stopped for walking in the middle of the street. I passed the cop standing in the grass, and we exchanged...a greeting? I made a point of crossing over the feeder onto the sidewalk and kept on going. At some point, I came under a bridge (from the highway), and looking back, I could see that the police officers are now involved in an ugly confrontation with two or three armed men. I ducked behind a cement column to hide.
Maybe the hiding would have worked, if I hadn't kept peeking around my cement column - but "they" saw me (the "bad guys") and the next thing I know, I'm surrounded by them! I was terrified, but it turns out, they just wanted me to take care of their baby while they...I don't know, plundered?
So, I'm taking care of the Bandit Baby, suddenly surrounded by sympathetic faces. Whoever these people are, they stick around, helping me keep Bandit Baby fed and changed until the "bad guy" clan returns to claim him, which they eventually do. And even though I feared that they'd want to dispose of me, they were comically grateful for the (forced) babysitting service and allowed me to go on my way.
Here my dream goes fuzzy, but the next part that I remember, I'm at a dog show - where I have a blue-gray lab thrust upon me by a stranger and I end up in charge of a friendly dog. Who I bring with me to a house, where, once again, virtual strangers leave their young children in my care. This time it was a pair twin toddlers, and two other babies. By this time, I'm getting pretty exasperated with Other Peoples' Babies, and I spend a restless night trying to keep them all asleep.
And then, without any warning, I find myself at another house, among a large group of parents and young children, getting ready to take the small fry Trick-or-Treating. I'm quite opposed to being dragged on this expedition, but no one pays me any attention. Oh, and my dad was there, just kind of standing around. I guess I got out of it somehow, though, because next thing I know, I'm wandering around my friend's eerily empty, door- and window-less, moonlit house.
Just as I had decided to find a comfortable corner to curl up and go to sleep (since no one was home and it was STILL the middle of the night), my friend shows up.
We start talking, over half-wall between a bedroom and a bathroom, which is when she tells me I have "@$$ breath" o_O
I'm pretty sure I'm the only the person who dreams of being called such a name! And if you're still reading, congratulations for sticking through all that! I'm sure it had to be incredibly boring, but I just had to get it out. I did lose some steam there, at the end, and didn't have the patience to go through all the finicky details, but really, with a dream like that, does it even matter?
On the one hand, I'm a little afraid to even hazard a guess at what all that insanity could mean. But on the other hand, I kind of don't really think it means anything more significant than any other dream; just that my mind is a busy place and I hash it all out in the dream world.
Somehow, I don't think that makes me as crazy as I was feeling when I first woke up this morning.
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