TheBanyanTree: Weird Dreams

[Theta]

When I was young, if someone asked me to describe the kinds of dreams I 
had at night, I would have told them that I never dream.  They, of 
course would have responded that everyone dreams, but I never remembered 
anything about them.  If my husband would wake me up, telling me I was 
dreaming, I thought he was crazy.  I wasn't dreaming - surely I would 
have an inkling of it.

Then shortly after I retired, I joined a women's study group and one of 
the books the group decided to work through was about interpreting 
dreams.  We were supposed to jot down a description of our dreams in a 
journal, and being the good girl who always tries to over-achieve, I 
started actually knowing that I was dreaming.  Sometimes I even managed 
to hang on to enough of the dream when I awoke to know what was 
happening, but only if I wrote something down immediately upon 
awakening.  I mean, before I yawned, stretched or blinked twice.  After 
the first 5 seconds, the dreams started to evaporate like morning mist.  
I therefore had very sketchy descriptions:
  -- meeting, naked, others embarrassed, I laughed
  -- being chased -- made me mad -- no idea who or why
  -- damn it, can't find whatever it was I was looking for
and one of my all time favorites - Cray computer lives in grandfather 
clock.  Had tea.  Discussed quantum mechanics with clock and teapot.  
Degenerated into name calling

That one generated a whole lot of conversation among the group, 
including the question of how much I knew about quantum mechanics.  I 
responded that I knew about as much as the teapot, and we both took 
exception to the grandfather clock saying we had steam for brains.

But those aren't the weird dreams.  A couple of years ago I started 
having what I call marathon dreams.  These are totally different from 
the so-called normal dreams.  They are as vivid as watching a movie, or 
in my case, being a player in a movie.  And they go on all night long.  
I know that because I will wake up three or four times during the course 
of the night and look at the clock, go back to sleep and the dream picks 
up right where it left off.  I'll wake up and go to the bathroom, come 
back to bed, go back to sleep and the dream picks up right where it left 
off.  Sometimes I even get up, play on the computer or read, but when I 
go back to sleep finally, yes, the dream picks up where it left off.

The first time this happened, I was a sniper in Sarajevo.  I would ghost 
my way through the ruined buildings of the town, finding a nice vantage 
point and start shooting.  After a few shots, as the enemy force started 
zeroing in on my sniper nest, I'd slip away to find a new place to shoot 
from.  All night long, I scaled towers and balanced on girders and 
wreaked mayhem on the people below.  I can even now see the buildings 
and feel the recoil of the rifle.  I found it a rather stunning 
experience to have such an unlikely dream become as real in my memory as 
if it was something I had actually, physically experienced.

The next marathon dream I had, I was about 10 years old and I was 
walking through grass as tall as I was behind the family's covered 
wagon.  All night long I walked through that miserable grass, kicking my 
feet in the dust.  It wasn't very exciting, but it was still incredibly 
vivid.

Then there was the space opera dream.  It started with me as a slave, 
trying my best to be invisible and inoffensive to my brutal masters.  
The planet I where I was living was attacked by another world's military 
and I was captured.  My captors weren't any kinder or more humane than 
my first owners, but they rewarded prowess in combat and they made me a  
soldier in their fleet.  Through the course of the night I advanced in 
skill and rank until I challenged the fleet commander to a duel, won and 
became the new fleet commander.  Then I engineered a coup and fled with 
my fleet to a far distant world where we were just preparing to make a 
stand against the pursuing fleet when the cat walked on my face, nibbled 
gently on my nose and announced that he wanted to be fed neowww.  That 
one, I might have wanted to hang on to a little longer, but even the 
marathon dream machine can't compete with a demanding cat.

The next time I fell into a marathon, I was in a long, elegant gown with 
hair in a braid past my waist.  I wore a stained apron over my dress and 
I was in a room that was filled with bottles of liquids and powders, 
fragrant drying herbs and small mortars and pestles.  I referred to a 
large, hand-written book in a language and alphabet that I, the dreamer, 
didn't recognize but the woman compounding the potions obviously knew 
well.  I carefully ground and pounded, mixed and brewed until my back 
ached and my feet hurt from standing on a cold stone floor.   When I 
finally reached a stopping place, I left the room, locking the door 
behind me and walked through stone corridors down to a kitchen where a 
fat cook handed me a cup of something hot and sweet which I took outside 
to sit on a bench with my back braced against a tall tree to watch the 
sun set over a large valley below.

There have been others.  Some were pretty boring (one night I addressed 
envelopes all night long), some aggravating, none quite as exciting as 
being a sniper or a commander of a space fleet.  And then there was the 
one last night, which is the reason I'm telling all of you about my 
weird dreams, because you were all there.

We were in an airport, all wearing the same t-shirt with the Banyan Tree 
on the front.  We were going to China and I had been chosen as the tour 
director, so I was trying to make sure all of you had the right tags on 
your bags.  (For the record, I've never been to China, and I absolutely 
hate tours, even with good friends.  If you don't have the right tag on 
your bag, well, who's problem is that?  Hmm?  Not mine!)  But there I 
was, checking tags, checking tickets, and trying to make the airline 
people understand that we were all supposed to be on the same plane, 
while they were trying to send half of us off to Antarctica.  I told 
them most firmly that none of us could go to Antarctica because none of 
us had the mandatory red insulated suits!  This overwhelming logic 
stunned them with its brilliance and we all finally got on the plane for 
China.  On the flight we had our own section of the plane except for 6 
families that had small babies.  The flight attendant told me she was 
required to put them all with us so no one else on the plane would be 
bothered with them, and sure enough all 6 babies screamed the whole 
interminable flight.  (See, I knew this wasn't real because if all of us 
had been on that plane, we would have been passing those babies around, 
spoiling them and making them laugh and we would have made friends for 
life with those parents!)

When we got to China there were the anticipated problems with passports, 
taxis (I lost some of you for a while - somehow I just expected that 
we'd all be a lot more travel- competent, especially Woofess, who has 
actually gone to China but seemed to be continually getting lost.)  I 
finally got tired enough of arguing with Chinese officials (oh, yeah, I 
could speak fluent Mandarin - imagine!) that I woke up enough to get up 
and worked on learning a new program that's an add-on to Photoshop for a 
while, hoping that all that concentration would break the pattern.  
About 4 a.m. I went back to bed, back to sleep, and there we all were on 
the Great Wall of China.  The tour at this point seemed to be going 
well.  Everyone was taking pictures and no one was falling off the wall, 
but then I realized that Sachet wasn't with us.  I had just begun to 
look for her when she showed up on her motorcycle.  Damn it, Sachet!  
Don't you know you can't ride your motorcycle on the Great Wall of 
China!!!!  I was pretty sure I wasn't going to keep her out of jail 
until Jena bribed the police with jars of homemade jam she pulled out of 
her backpack, and Peter threw down a smoke screen of obfustication that 
baffled the police so much they fell asleep and we all made our escape 
back to the airport and our flight home.  We highjacked the drinks cart 
and were just passing around the champagne to toast a successful trip 
when I woke up to sunlight coming through the window and puppy kisses 
from Gypsy.

So here's the deal.  If we really all want to go some place together, 
and you want me to organize it, let's pick some place I'm a little more 
comfortable with, like the Grand Canyon or Yellowstone.  And you all are 
responsible for your own bag tags.  Okay?

And please don't pass this story along to your friendly neighborhood 
psychiatrist because I have no desire to be the object of a study on 
abnormal dream sequences.

(I did have fun traveling with all of you, even if you did make me crazy.)

Theta