The Clothesline Dream

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I had a bizarre dream in which I had strung a clothes line from the gables of the roof of the house I live in now, right outside the kitchen window. And of course, I had just done laundry and hung all of my very favorite clothes, when a really violent storm blew up, and I frantically tried to get the clothes off the line before they all blew away.

Sorry to bore you with something that sounds so mundane, but it fascinated me because everything actually made sense except the clothesline. I had been worrying about getting my laundry done the day before. I had had a conversation about “favorite clothes” with some one. Earlier that day, there was a violent storm with high winds.

And the apartment was actually mine… You know how you will have a dream that your in your apartment or house, and you know it’s yours, but when you wake up, you realize, “that was nothing like my house, at all.” Well this actually was my apartment, my kitchen window, my gabled roof.

But where did that damned clothesline come from? And why am I so obsessed with my clothes? That really isn’t like me… Perhaps they represented something I was afraid would blow away…

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Reoccurring Contact Lens Dreams

In high school I got my first pair of contact lenses, that you can also order here. That was pretty unusual at the time; people didn’t wear them as much as they do now, and they were incredibly expensive. They also didn’t have disposable lenses; you had to clean them and care for them and hope they lasted for a year or two.

Because of the expense, my parents put the fear of God in me about taking care of my new contact lenses, so far from being the joyous experience it should have been, having lenses nearly gave me ulcers; I was terrified I’d lose them or tear them.

I started having reoccurring dreams about them, and in every dream they would change into something different, and I’d know there was something wrong with them, but I would still try frantically to put them in. I had a dream where they because little white shirt buttons. And one where they became large, blue, round jewels, like the Hope Diamond.

But in the dreams I had most often, they would still be lenses, but large, and cloudy. I worked at the library back then, and I had one dream that I had opened my lens case at work and that they had changed and grown huge; two inches in diameter. I still put them into my eyes, though, and tried to reshelve books, but I couldn’t really see them.

I had one of these dreams last year, when I was having too much trouble with my lenses and switched back to wearing glasses most of the time.

Contact Lens

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Reoccurring Dream: Mazes

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Since I was young, I’ve had a reoccurring theme show up in my dreams: mazes. It’s usually a familiar building; in high school it was the library I worked in; in college it was the dorm, since then it’s been various apartment buildings and the places I worked.

The building is familiar to me, but the layout is not; as I wander (or sometimes run, depending on being whether I’m being chased in the dream) through the rooms or halls, I discover passages I’ve never noticed before. I end up turning down them and quickly get lost. Usually the dream ends in a panic as I realize I’m trapped or so lost I’ll never get out.

A notable exception to the above is a maze dream I had about Jess Curtis, a very beautiful woman who sings locally here in Indianapolis, and a casual acquaintance of mine. In this dream, we’re in a house I don’t recognize, and she is leading me along, flirtatiously, always just one step around the corner from me, beckoning me onward. Eventually she climbs though a window, and I go after her. The window leads to another room in the house, where an old man sits, and he tells me which way to go to head her off at the pass. It works and I manage to grab her and hold her in my arms as the dream fades and I wake up.

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Quicksand Dream

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The first of two recent dreams about death…

In the dream, I went downstairs to the basement, which looking back now, I think was the basement on South East Fourth Street from my childhood.

Growing in the center of the floor was a plant; a weed, I thought, like a tiny tree. I went over to it to pull it up, I guess because I didn’t think it should be growing there. It seems kind of absurd; a weed growing in the basement with no sunlight. It had a reddish cast to the stalk, kind of like a rhubarb plant, but the stalk was round, rather than square like that plant. It had spiky leaves, and grew upward.

I went over to it and pulled on it, and it broke free of the ground pretty freely, and I was surprised to see that it was growing in sand rather than soil.

Then the ground started to shift beneath me, and I lost my footing. The sand started to fall into the hole I had just created, and I slid down with it. the sand quickly covered me, and I continued my downward slide.

My mind was racing, and I remember I thought, “if I can just stop here, I’ll be able to swim my way out to the surface.” But the sand swirled around me, and I kept falling farther. It dawned on me that I’d fallen perhaps fifty feet, and that I would never be able to get out alive.

And then I woke up, of course, have frightened myself half to death. And I am still wondering at the inner mechanics of my brain, and how I had constructed such a strange scenario with which to frighten myself. Because that dream still haunts me whenever I feel like I’m on unsure footing, both literally and emotionally.

I thought about it this summer when we all went to lake Michigan and laid out on the beach at Warren Dunes. It had been years since I’d been on a beach, and the sand had a way of sucking in around my feet that made my heart jump.
And we were walking across the rocks at The Falls, right here in Broadripple, where every step I took was on an unsteady rock that teetered beneath me, and paralyzed me to the spot, which made my friends laugh.

And I suddenly thought of it tonight, when the fears about my financial state and whether I have achieved what I should by the age that I am overwhelmed me when I laid down to sleep.

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