Dreams From Last Spring

Prelude

You can find a PDF version of this post here.

Here are some of my dreams directly from the dream-journal. I have the worst dreams during spring, though this spring is less intense. Last spring was dreadful, and the text below is from that time period. The dreams do not have dates, but the order is correct. While rereading them, before posting here, my disquiet returned. Would appreciate any insight at all. Be forewarned, these are kind of graphic — I cannot control what is in my dreams.

The Dreams

We need to sleep while we dream, because if we did not, people would think we are mad. Whenever I wake up, and realize that I cannot recall last night's dream, I am half relieved and half disappointed. My dreams, are a little odd, very frightening, but rarely boring. The boring ones reveal the most about my mundane anxieties, while the others, if they reveal anything, I have a hard time decoding — if only Freud, or Jung, or Lacan were still alive.

I have recently changed my allergy medication, because the old one started giving me migraines. The new medication works as well as the original, but I have traded the waking migraines for sleeping nightmares. Heads I lose, tails you win.

The first dream, I am lost, and I am seeking the master (in the sense of meister or meistro). I get the sense that I am late, not for a meeting or event, but in the general sense of too many sunrises have passed, and seem to be passing faster, and I seem to be lagging, and someday soon, I will stop chasing the sun, because it is too far, and I am too tired, and too sad (to run faster, because even in a sunless darkness there are puzzling things right at my feet, that I can touch, smell, taste, disect). So I keep going, my surrounding a kind of foggy blur, until I get inside, warm myself by candle-light. Not sure where the inside is, but it is shelter from a cold fog. I look around, start snooping, until I find someone. There is not enough light for a face to face conversation, so I bring over a candle. I inhale cold morbid fear. The woman in front of me is looking at me, but I cannot look at her face, because I am distracted by her abdomen, specifically her chest. Imagine a large heart (like the symbol you can make with your hands, or the emoji) where her breasts would be. Now imagine that the heart was actually a hole that spanned the chest from shoulder to shoulder, and that the viscera of the chest cavity were gone — just an empty, bloody ribcage with a heart-shaped entrance (or exit). I ask her if she is okay. I ask her what happened. I ask her (weakly, sorrowfully) if I can help. I ask her why this happened. There is a pause. She tells me that she is the mother of goddesses. I wake up.

The second dream, I am still late, need to move faster. It is bright and sunny, so not as late as the last dream. I realize that streets are slow, so I move along the powerlines between houses. I feel disembodied. Maybe I am a very fast squirrel. Or maybe I am electricity. Unclear, but cannot contemplate this, because the sun won't wait for me to do that. Much of this dream is forgotten, but I do remember, that while I was moving along the powerlines, someone spoke to me, about something I cannot recall. They could not be seen, and I could not hear them, but I understood them. I understood them the way you can understand the stars, or a comet, or an eclipse. And even though there was voice to hear, and no body to see, I could tell that this spirit was female. I woke up. It is interesting that while we are awake, we have to make sense of our senses (i.e. the thing that we do when we get confused by an abstract painting, or a foggy road, and have to squint in order to gain an awareness, a resonance), but when we dream, many things (okay, fewer things than I would like) make sense before you can sense them, if you can even sense them at all.

The third dream, is in a desert. Not the dry and cold kind, but the hot kind, where you can see the air shimmer in front of you, and expect to see mirages. There is a city, that looks like what I would imagine Babylon to look like. We (I followed some travelers, hoping to blend in) go inside, and I see something cool, a winged monkey. It flies away, so I wander away from the group, until I meet a person who looks like he (very aggressive alpha male type) was made out of pastels. No face, no features, just man-shaped pastel blob, that nobody seems to care about. He starts moving away, so I follow — if I cannot examine the winged monkey, then I will examine this insufferably arrogant and self-important pastel-man. He has no voice, but he puts pastel-graffiti on walls (sandy, with colorful mural tiling) and the people are trying to clean it up, and they start giving me angry looks. They do not understand that I am not to blame. It is the pastel man, who is putting vulgar pastel images on your beautiful walls, not me. I mean it is an open and shut case, but they do not believe me (not sure if they speak my language, cannot remember). I realize I cannot do anything about the pastels, and noticed that pastel-man has started to quickly walk away, so I followed him, because well, somebody has to. I follow him underground to a kind of catacomb. He decides to sleep/nap, on one of the stone sarcophaguses. Maybe he was always going to do this, or maybe he realized he could not outrun me. As he laid down I felt that a circle has closed (why does no language have a name for this emotion?), that everything that has happened before will now happen again, and I wake up.

The fourth dream is in an Egyptian skyscraper (not Egypt, because it does not look nor feel like Egypt — the skyscraper was Egyptian, in the same way that the Sphinx or the Pyramids or King Tut are Egyptian). And I meet a guy from India, who has some distressing news. He tells me that hidden in the skyscraper, are «Sanskrit Artifacts» (not sure what that means, other than they are at minimum Indic, and at most have Sanskrit markings on/in them). They do not belong there, and were in fact stolen by Egypt from India. So, we enter the skyscraper. He tells me that this is the oldest skyscraper (which is nonsense, because the oldest skyscraper is much smaller, and in NYC). We go inside, and walk right past reception to the elevators. We decode how to operate the elevators. They are not supposed to take us to the top floor, which is fine because the artifacts are in lower floors. Also the elevator can curve around the top of the skyscraper (which is a major safety hazard, but nobody seems to care). We take many elevator trips to retrieve the Sanskrit artifacts, and give them to an uber driver (this is not the smartest thing to do, but my new friend tells me this is the only way). I want to see the top floor, but the guy tells me that this is a terrible idea, and we have more trips to make. I tell the elevator to curve around the top of the skyscraper, and I open it, while we are at the zenith of the curve. We fall into the top floor. The guy is furious with me. Top floor is dark, even though I can see the sun through the windows. I look around, while the sanskrit-saviour tries to jump back into the elevator, whose doors are 3 to 5 meters above us (very tall ceiling). I notice a door and open it. I try to close it, but it won't. And, now we have maybe half a dozen giant mummies slowly entering the room. Their faces were clearly visible, yellow, parchment-like skin, tattoos, dried out eyes, decayed teeth (too many teeth, in fact, at odd angles, kind of like if tom cruise was a mummy), black saliva (or whatever that was). I do not want to go into detail about what happened next, but I will say that mummies are the absolute worst kissers (cracked lips, foul breath, selfish).

The fifth dream I am with an ex. Surprising, because, we fell out of touch long ago, during the pandemic. She was not angry at me anymore, said she missed me. I told her I missed her too, even though I did not mean it. We talked and joked and reminisced. I asked her if she remembered that hotel. She said she did. We would meet there, a year after we first broke up, so that her fiance would not find out that she was cheating on him. We go to the hotel, the four seasons, and get the same room on the 16th floor. I am scared to ask her if she ever got married, so I decide to stop talking. We undress, go to the window, and do everything just like last time. And just like last time she panics and nearly knocks me off balance and onto my back. I stumble, catch my balance, and ask her what is wrong. And just like last time she says that someone is looking. I lean over that window-seat-thing that all hotels have, and see a guy, on the sidewalk, arm around his girlfriend pointing directly at me. And just like last time, I look at her and tell her with a laugh: he's telling his girl, «see, I told you other people do it!». She is angry at me again, because I did not change, and she did. And because she did, she gets dressed and starts to leave. I ask her: where can I find you? And she tells me: between God's teeth.