DREAMLIFE
I find
that as I get older (and older) I am unable to remember my dreams, or to remember
only a few brief parts, which I then immediately lose. This is painful; on waking I can sense the
flavor of dreaming so to speak, but retain nothing of it. Age brings so many losses, small and large,
that this one shouldn’t particularly distress me, but it does.
Then lately
I found a notebook in which from early 2008 to early 2014 I recorded dreams
that I found to be intriguing or puzzling or outlandish in some way or another.
I posted a few of these in my old LiveJournal, now unrecoverable. But having the book again tempts me to set
out a few for amusement or the general interest in dream-life. They won’t be in time order, nor appear
often.
One from
August 2008: I was living with, or was member of, a Latino family in an
apartment. We were talking, a
middle-aged man and children, when I saw smoke arising from the floor below,
between the window and the curtain. We
all have to escape. More smoke in
another room. I go into a bedroom where
I know the elderly and senile grandma is
in bed. I explain to her (“Nana”) that
we have to go, and I pick her up – thin, just bones. The strange thing was that all this seemed to
be happening in a play or movie, and I knew what would happen next, or
recognized it when it did: the smoke, the reactions of the people coming on cue,
or as though rehearsed and familiar.
When I was younger. I had a recurring dream of walking in to the same small village from a wooded area.
ReplyDeleteRepetitive dreams are rare. I've had a few. I think the "repeating" dream is actually a repeated imemory of the first instance.
DeleteI have the same problem, remembering dreams now as I age. I never connected the two. But I am trying to pay attention and asking to remember. I bet, as you turn your attention to these old dreams, your psyche may be stirred up to wake you in the middle of the night. I had one of those a few nights ago. The dream was so startling that I didn’t even stop to write it down. Just stayed with the images. These are terrible times, truly dystopian; much to work with.
ReplyDeleteThanks. I am hopeful that training will teach this old dog some tricks.
Delete