TheBanyanTree: Dreams

[Monique Colver]

My dreams are often populated by fanciful and improbable settings, a mixture
of fantasy and reality thrown about so haphazardly that there's no telling
which is which. I'd like to say that they make sense on some deep cellular
level, but I fear this would be lying. There is no sense, no rhyme nor
reason, though the sensation of being blocked or having lost my way occurs
frequently. Why I can find the access to the stairs that lead to the top?
And once at the top, why I cannot find the easy access down the stairs?
Instead, I venture down the difficult way, and then see everyone else coming
down the main staircase, the easier way, and I'm dumbfounded at how they
found their way so easily while I foundered to find the hard way.

            This cannot have any meaning, can it?

            Houses make a great show of reappearing in my dreams, as if the
thought of houses is never far from my mind. Do I equate houses with safety?
Or is it the thought of confinement? I can still see, in my mind, the white
house on a hill I once dreamed of, and it went through several incarnations.
It's chased me for several years, and has been so kind as to make
appearances in other unrelated dreams. "Making a cameo appearance, the white
house on the hill!" The terrain around it is rocky, and the road winding up
to it is filled with a variety of other houses and buildings. The white
house is not at the top of the hill, nor the bottom, but somewhere in the
middle.

            It reminded me of a house I once owned on a hill, yet was
nothing like my house on the hill. The reality that intrudes into my dreams
is not the reality of my life. It's as if it's been filtered through a prism
of my psyche, and come out distorted, slightly warped, a semblance of its
former self without all the pain. Perhaps it's my psyche distilled, which is
not a particularly comforting thought.

            Sometimes I drive past the white house, and it's nothing more
than scenery in another dream. Will I wake up one of these days and drive to
the white house, and then say, "Aha! There it is! The white house!" Will I
then enter the white house and then fall into a horror movie of my own
making, where the pictures are not what they seem and where some invisible
force is out to get me for reasons that are never entirely clear? I think I
saw that movie once. It's already been done. I might as well move on.

            I dreamt of champagne last night. This is not particularly
common. I also dreamt of a clear tall tumbler full of a drink I'd never had,
and which was not what I was supposed to ask for. But it wasn't for me
anyway, it was for someone else, and when I got back to where she was, she
was gone, so I took it for myself. This reminds me of when I was in high
school, and on a camping trip with my church youth group. I was part of the
breakfast staff, and for some reason advance planning had neglected to bring
along enough food. Once breakfast was cooked for all camp goers and
counselors, there was no food left for me. I sat at the picnic table
watching everyone else eat. One of the counselors placed a plate full of
eggs and fried hot dogs in front of me, said something that I didn't quite
catch, and walked off.

            I looked at the food. Since I hadn't quite heard what he'd said
I wasn't sure if he meant the food for me or not. But I was hungry, and I
told myself it must be for me, so I started eating it. Then he came back and
said, "Why are you eating my breakfast?"

            Ahhh. He wanted me to watch his breakfast, not eat it. Oops.
This is a common faux pas for me. Thirty-five years later the guilt of
having eaten someone else's breakfast stays with me. I'm sure he's recovered
from the shock by now, but I'm not sure I have.

            I might mention that at the church campout there was no
champagne served with breakfast, no mimosas, nothing that interesting. We
were good kids, and only smoked cigarettes and weed where no one could see
us, not openly at breakfast. Alcohol was a bit more difficult to sneak in to
those trips, though it worked quite well in other church youth groups where
we were allowed to wander into town at night, on our own.

            This is how it goes with my dreams. One seemingly isolated
incident will lead to another seemingly isolated incident as if they were on
the same path, as if I were on the same path going from one to the other,
and branching out from this path are other ways which may, or may not, have
any relevance to anything else. Some of the incidents are dreams only, and
some are flotsam of real life, though I hesitate to call my waking life any
more real than my dream life. Sometimes, in my waking life, I feel as if I'm
living a very pleasant dream, so who's to say? One way to tell is that my
dreams are less likely to lead to logical conclusions, but that's not
necessarily proof.

            More research is obviously called for. This may entail some
serious naps, since some of my best dreaming occurs then. It is a sacrifice
I make in the name of science and, like all good sacrifices, comes at much
cost to myself. Wake me in a few hours.


-- 
Monique Colver