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.