dreams – Page 3 – commonplacebook.com

Quicksand Dream

Post author:HFM
Post published:September 8, 1997
Post category:Dreams

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.

Dodgeball God Dream

Post author:HFM
Post published:May 12, 1997
Post category:Dreams

It’s hard to remember exactly how this dream began, but I remember for some reason being on the top of a sign pole, out in the countryside. I was there with Hercules, him beiname of dodgeball with energy balls that could kill us.

We were trapped, so we continued to do this for awhile, until Zeus came and rescued us; I can’t remember exactly how he did. Athena was with him, and we discovered that Zeus had lost some of his powers and couldn’t get back to Mount Olympus, and for some reason I was the only one who could find the way.

So I started to lead our little party off in the direction that I was aware held the answer… after we walked for awhile, I led us up over a hill, and there was the Space Shuttle. I knew right away that we needed to get on the shuttle to get to Olympus.

There were guards milling around, so we had to sneak on. There weren’t any ladders or stairs leading up to the shuttle, just glass blocks covered by wire mesh (I don’t know, don’t ask). But the mesh was too fine to get a grip on. So I looked at Zeus, and he managed to summon up enough energy to crimp the wire so I could get my fingers in and climb up. As I was in the process of climbing, I woke up, of course.

I have no analysis at all for this dream. I can’t even begin to imagine what made me combine ancient Greek myth and the space shuttle, which I think is nice, but not really interesting. I don’t remember what I ate, either. It must have been a burrito.

The Military Dream

Post author:HFM
Post published:May 5, 1997
Post category:Dreams

In this dream, I was in a high-rise apartment or office building on an upper floor. It was dark, and I was there with a bunch of other people, none of whom I recognized. We were part of some military group, and we had some assignment or mission to carry out. We were putting on military gear, camouflage and helmets. Everyone else had rifles, but when I think back, I didn’t. After we got all our gear on, we stood hidden at the windows waiting for some even to occur.

Eventually, it did, and we all started running downstairs to go outside. But I discovered as I was running, that I had forgotten my socks and shoes. I had to stop, go back and put them on, and try to catch up. By the time I got outside, everyone else was already in place. Then I woke up.

If I had to interpret, I’d say this dream was motivated by my fear of falling behind, and my fear of losing track of the details…

HTML Mark-Up Dream

Post author:HFM
Post published:April 14, 1997
Post category:Dreams

If you remember the movie Fantasia, or even better, the movie they showed in high school, Donald Duck in MathMagic Land, where Donald was being chased by anthropomorphic numbers, you have some idea what this dream was like.

Basically, it was my job to place appropriate (?!) HTML mark-up tags on everything; i.e. the physical world: doorknobs, light switches, window frames, everything and anything. Don’t ask me what tags went with what; I knew exactly at the time, but I have no idea now. Anyway, I knew that I was way behind, so I was working as quickly as I could. The faster I worked, the more efficient I became until I was moving so fast I was practically flying. I knew I was doing a great job, and I was so thrilled to be doing what I was doing, that I became ruthlessly efficient, and eventually my frenetic pace caused me spontaneously combust into a lightning shower of energy and euphoria, at which time I awoke and realized I had to get up and go to work. Which really pissed me off.

The Dream Where Prince Died

Post author:HFM
Post published:February 7, 1997
Post category:Dreams

In this dream, I found out that Prince had just died, and I was terribly upset, because I felt that we would be lost without his music. We (Me and who else? I don’t know) decided to go to his funeral.

While there, I ran into someone who was explaining how he died; this gets really abstract, and yet I understood it completely in the dream. He died of “clipline failure” whic was his sorrow at newspaper clippings about himself. (As if?)

Strangely, I not only understood this unusual cause of death, I could think of a similar story I’d once heard about a man who died from photo captions, because he was the person responsible for placing the captions on newspaper photos for years, and eventually died because of it.

We began to walk through the funeral, which looked like a combination between a performance art show and an carnival, with people acting out extraordinarily creative tableauxs. However, I noticed immediately that nowhere in the art works, or performers clothes, or indeed anywhere at the funeral, did the color purple appear; almost as though it were gone forever.