beautiful, funny, sad & true

This morning, I had a dream in which I was involved in a sort of Game in which real life happens, and IS happening, all the time. All the characters and I age slightly, in this game. I start out as a junior high kid. Each choice my friends and I make has consequences, or benefits, a short while later. I’m walking along, trying to meet a specific person, but I don’t really know who. Each ‘Section’ of the game seems to have an ethereal ‘loop’ quality to it. Things will happen two or three times, but in minutely different ways, so if I don’t learn what I’m supposed to learn or make friendships I’m supposed to make, a different (incorrect? hard to tell) outcome will occur.

The game starts, and I’m standing in a soccer field, filled with a marching band and a bunch of people milling around. It’s a beautiful sunny day. If I make it past the Marching Band section, and meet the people I’m supposed to meet, I can progress to the Outdoor Market section. If I make it past the Outdoor Market section, I get to the Street Fair section. . Each section is perhaps a hundred yards across, separated by a paved street. But when I’m in each section, I don’t see any of the other sections until I’m ready to move on to the next one.

I walk through the Marching Band, and I meet up with one of my friends. We narrowly miss the opportunity for him to introduce me to a girl he knows, so we wait for a few minutes until the ‘loop’ repeats itself, and she marches back by us again. This time, we match her stride and he introduces me to her, and she steps out of the Marching Band to join us. Her clothes change too, and now instead of a band uniform, she’s wearing jeans and a hoodie. She has very short hair and plastic-framed glasses. She joins me and we walk to the Outdoor Market section of the game together.

We meet up with a handful of a different and slightly older group of my friends, who are unusually tall, athletic and good-looking. We’ve become slightly older ourselves; perhaps early high school age. We sit and join my friends at a table. One of my friends is laughing in a very strange and evil way. In slightly slow motion, the dream’s “camera” zooms in on a gold coin that he’s holding between his left thumb and middle finger. The light reflects off the coin, the camera pulls back, and he uses his right hand to flick it directly into the eye of a girl across the room. I’m horrified by this, but I notice that she doesn’t seem to be hurt in any way, but it seems to make her slightly less attractive somehow. The guy who is talking to her ends his conversation with her, and walks away to talk with someone else instead. I get up to leave, because I’m afraid of the “consequences” this will have for me in the Game if I stay with this particular group of friends. The girl I came with decides to stay. I get up from the table and walk from the Outdoor Market section, through the Street Scene section, and clear over to the Waterfront Park section of the game.

This section looks a little like the RiverPlace Marina. There is a wide, short sidewalk with small circular tables on each side. There’s a grassy area that goes down to a river, and this is one of the boundaries of the Game. I walk down the sidewalk and along the river, sort of looking around, and just before I move back into the Street Scene section another girl joins me. She is slightly taller than me, and she has a similar look to the earlier girl I met previously, with very short hair and glasses, except she’s slightly better-looking and a little bit older—late high school or early college, as am I—and she seems a little bit like a Guide. We silently walk together, side by side, into the Street Scene section of the game.

As soon as we walk into the new scene, we are in our early to mid-twenties. We see people we know all around us, but this Section of the game feels more oppressive and slightly Orwellian. There are military guards walking around everywhere, and there are many streets down which we are not allowed to walk. It’s also different in that we can see the other Sections. If we look to the left, we can see the sunny soccer field where the Marching Band is walking in the distance. The soccer field morphs into the Outdoor Market, which is next to the Street Scene, and to our right we can see the Park, back the way we entered. Some people we know (two or three of whom I know from college in real life—Pat L. and two or three I wasn’t friends with, but I recognize them) are hanging around on the street corner, dressed like thugs, threatening people. They’re making jokes and speaking crudely, both to other people and to us. One of them is throwing a tire high in the air and letting it roll down the side of a fence, where it rolls back to him. We don’t know if we can trust them or not, so we decide that we can’t. This is all unspoken between the two of us, by the way. We can each sort of tell what the other is thinking, and if we can’t, we can gesture or guide each other through various scenarios.

We are starting to become anxious to leave this Game. We are now in our middle to late twenties, and we are now the same height, interestingly. Our relationship seems to have changed by now as well. It’s slightly unclear if we are merely companions or something more, because we hold hands sometimes as we walk, but we’re anxious and intent on leaving. We walk down one street, and are stopped by guards. We turn back and walk down another street, only to find that it has been blocked by the canal that becomes the River in the Park Section. The bridge between the two Sections is out and we are trapped. We look across to the Park Section and see people–Extras in the Game rather than ‘real’ people–strolling lazily in the sunshine. We turn and see another exit near a railroad crossing and start to run toward it. Two guards, then more and more, yell something to us, the crossing arm starts to lower, the bells start ringing and the red lights start flashing as we approach, but we make it across, moments before a train comes rushing by behind us. We smile, squeeze each other’s hand and breathe a sigh of relief.

We run along the edge of the Street Scene section, clear around to the edge of the Park Section, past a bunch of people who see us but who can no longer reach us. On one side of us is the Game, on the other side is black, empty space. We are unsure what to do. We can’t find an Exit, but we don’t seem to be part of this Game anymore, either.

* * * * *

Very strange and life-like dream, in that each person you’d meet would affect not just you, but lots of other people, and that would affect the choices you would make. But nothing you would do would have an effect right away; it would take a while before you realized if you had made a good decision or not.

The ‘action’ was very slow and deliberate, but I always felt detached from it, at least in the early parts. (Gee, I wonder if that’s a metaphor for my childhood. . .) The later parts, when my female companion and I were trying to leave the Game, were very fast-paced and tense, and it all felt a bit like the Truman Show at the end, where things start happening randomly, just for the sake of stopping us and trying to keep us in the game.

I woke up at 5:15 in the morning, and I instantly went to the computer and started writing this down, to make sure I got the feel of this dream right. It was a very interesting and vivid one.

Last night I had a dream in which I was at some sort of fundraiser function in the basement of a church or school. My friends and I were putting this thing on, and the people who were at this event kept expecting us to make these special cookies. We were frantically trying to wash all the dishes that were piled up all over the room, so we’d have room to cook, and people were starting to get restless and angry. I went looking around for a recipe, and I finally found one on the bottom of a cereal box (which seems perfectly logical, right?)

Somebody came up and asked me how soon the cookies would be ready, so I gestured toward the long tables full of dishes and said, “Well, you can see what we’re dealing with here. . .”

Then I woke up.

I didn’t want to, however, because the bed was so o o o comfortable. It was especially cold in Oregon last night, so we threw the nice, soft blue blanket on top of the bed, and slept like. . .uhh. . .two people. . .who. . .slept well.

Since I’ve been re-posting things from my old MySpace blog, I’ve been having a blast revisiting some of these old entries. It was particularly fun to come across this beautiful dream I had back in May.

* * * * * * *

So last night I crashed at about 11:00 p.m., after wanting to do nothing more than lie on my bed most of the day. At about 1:00 a.m., though, my eyes popped open, and there was no closing them, no matter what I did.

Finally, about 5:30 or 6:00 this morning, I drifted off to sleep. I’m glad I did, too, because I had the most amazing dream. . .

When it started, I was walking beside a lake with three friends of mine, two women and another man (nobody I knew from ‘real’ life). One of the women was handing each of us a little balloon full of a particular kind of tree sap and explaining to us that we should drop the sap into the lake, and either ask a question or make a wish. I chose to make a wish; I wished for Real Love. As I did, and the sap dripped into the lake, it created bubbles, the membranes of which were brightly illuminated either red or green, and that stayed illuminated for quite a few feet as they descended.

So then the dream changed and I found myself in the middle of a hilly, rocky dirt landscape. I walked for a really long time, until a boy named Tzeki showed me the way back to the village, and we talked and became friends. He showed me how he was learning to use a special kind of gun to send messages. This sounded intriguing, and I asked him to tell me more about it.

“Okay,” he said, “we’re having practice right now. Come on.”

So we walked over to this huge field, where three or four groups of boys were learning how to use these guns. The youngest were about 5 years old, Tzeki’s group was middle-school age, and then there were the mid- to late teenagers. I was my normal age in the dream. They all saw me as a traveler, and were quite happy to take me in and show me around their little village.

So I watched them all practice shooting, and then it began to get dark, and everyone seemed to get really excited. They took me to a gigantic cement building, and when we went in, there was a large swimming pool inside, and the ceiling was a pool. I hadn’t known until then that this civilization existed UNDERWATER. So the kids said to look up, that these bubbles would come floating down to us. As I watched, sure enough, a myriad of bubbles, each of which had either a faint greenish or reddish hue, started to descend from the surface, high above our heads. Before long, the room was filled with swirling bubbles, and each person was trying to catch one in his hand.

Tzeki said, “These are wishes and questions. . .if you’re lucky enough to catch one, you can answer it.” As soon as he said that, I realized that I had been on the other end of this scenario, with my friends, along the edge of the lake. I started trying to grab a bubble, and caught one in my hand, but was unsure of what to do with it. “Think of a response, and it’ll float back,” Tzeki said. So I tried that a couple of times, with a little bit of success, but I could see that it would take a bit of practice.

This lasted for a while, and when it was light, I walked on my way again, under a clear blue sky, amazed by what I had seen. I walked back to the shooting field, and suddenly understood that the bubbles were ‘generic’ messages, but the messages that the guns would fire were meant to communicate directly with a certain person of their choice on the edge of the lake. All the boys had been cheering each other on and trying to shoot a message to my friend, the one who had explained to the rest of us how to dip the sap in the water. They saw her as the leader, in a way, and wanted to be sure to communicate with her if they could.

I ran in the direction they had been shooting, and saw that the younger kids had barely shot more than twenty feet or so, but that Tzeki’s had gone hundreds of yards. I wondered if he realized that his bullets hadn’t been received by my friends up above. I ran on until I found myself in the same dirty, rocky clearing that I had started in, only now I saw it for what it really was; the dry lake bed. I found the older boys’ bullets all over the ground, almost to the edge of the lake, but their shots hadn’t made it either.

I started to run back to tell them what I had learned and seen, and that’s when I woke up.

SUCH a beautiful dream! I’d say the sleepless night was worth it, to have such an amazing experience like that.

I had a bit of a nightmare the other night.

I don’t remember how it started, but I do remember that I was hiking along a steep, mountainous, curvy trail, like a fire road, along the top of a mountain range. When I looked behind me, I noticed that a person in a very fake-looking gorilla suit was following me. He was running up behind me, and I started to be a bit afraid, so I ran.

Every time I my dream’s location changed, the gorilla would appear in the new location. I don’t remember the other locations, but the last thing I do remember is that since he’d been following me and threatening me for such a long time that I decided to turn the tables and find out who was beneath the mask.

The next time he came at me and started attacking me. I grabbed hold of his neck and pushed him away, at the same time I was pulling at his mask to try and get it off. Underneath the mask was an even scarier REAL gorilla, who had his teeth bared and kept trying to bite me. I was terrified, and as I grabbed his head in my hands, his face began to change into that of a very old woman. It seemed to be a spirit of some sort. I said, “Leave me, leave me,” as if to say, “Spirit, leave me alone.” I was so terrified that I woke up and STILL SAW HER THERE, six inches from my face. I said again, barely audibly, “Leave me. Leave me.” After about five seconds, her face gradually disappeared, like that of the Cheshire cat, and her eyes were the last thing to fade.

I was so terrified, there was nothing to do but cry.

I’ve never had a dream like that before, particularly one that carried over into my waking state. If you’ve never had it happen, I don’t recommend it.

* * * * *

p.s. – I had this dream in January of 2006, but I just now copied it over to this blog so I could complete the “OK, All You Dream Interpreters” series. I thought I’d already posted it, but I hadn’t. So there you go.