When you wake up in the morning from a vivid dream and it gives you a knot in your stomach, do the previous day's anxieties create the dream or did the dream actually make the knot appear in your stomach?
This one was both kinda abstract --a good part of it consisted of text on a screen-- and very vivid at the same time, with the repetitive and cramped OCD quality that my less pleasant dreams tend to have. It had to do with the unexplained disappearance of a group of people, the Cambrians, who lived in northern Spain, whose absence had been preceded a few days ago by a similar disappearance of another group of 500, whose name began with B. In the dream I realized that this first group was a figment of my imagination, not real. I wound up wondering, in the dream, if I had lost my grip on reality. Or if the Buddhists were right and all the things we consider real and hold on to are just a cosmic junkpile of wishes and illusions. It left me a bitshaken. And my stomach is still not calmed down, hours later.
It's likely that part of this is just separation anxiety. B is in northern Spain at the moment. But it was my discovery of the unreality of something which felt quite real that disturbed me.
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7 comments:
You and B are together, aren't you? At the very least, he's a dear friend. I've lived long enough to know that a union of minds and hearts is just as potent as a union of bodies.
Aren't dreams a way for the subconscious to channel the concerns and thoughts that we don't confront when we are conscious, or help us give shape to them?
The part about B is easy to explain. You're worried that you will lose him in some way. The unreality part is trickier. Have you been wondering that something that you hold to be true may actually be false, that you're wrong about something you believe very strongly. Are you worried that your connection with B, whatever it is, may not exist, or that it is based on false understandings?
Dreams about mortality and morality often have a similar effect on me. I once had a dream that I saw Hell in its entirety, a braching structure that resembled the roots of a tree, filled with the souls of the damned as screaming and contorted faces. At the very bottom of the roots was a white light that gave no illumination; everything else was surrounded by infinite darkness. For a time, I was convinced that it was a real vision. Dreams of Hell are never simple fire and brimstone for me. In my dreams, it has also taken on the form of a very dirty city that strongly resembled Manhattan, and everybody was just more dour and gloomy than usual.
-Sean
Funny you should mention "dear friend." That's B's regular way of describing me.
So you _are_ together! Good to know my mentor is being looked after. :)
-Sean
Well, "together" is a little simple. But he certainly looks after me. He's a terrific fella.
I would wonder if this dream is just a sort of near-lucidity going awry...a strong reality-sense and dream-space colliding... 'coz--
Some of the worst dreams I have is where I'm travelling around, and I realize that I don't know just where I am, nor how I've gotten there, nor where I was trying to get to, and also feeling weird... I conclude that perhaps I've massively drunk, or drugged by somebody, or having some sort of sudden onset severe alzheimers, etc. Then very worried about what I should do next...
If I am luckier, I may realize, "Well, of course I'm so confused, I'm asleep!"
So that's what I would think if I had dreamt of the lost Bippyans who weren't.
--Nathan
Borderland, eh?
Another example of this sort of not quite lucid dream:
An alien invasion is occurring, very "War of the Worlds" in manner. Towering machines are roaming the landscape, destroying people and things with rays. People screaming, fleeing, hiding. At some point I realize that the alien machines are exactly like ordinary desklamps, as if mobilized by stop-motion animation. It's like a super-lo-budget movie, maybe a spoof. I can't imagine what we would be doing /in/ such a movie. So while everyone is dealing with the invasion /qua/ invasion, I'm also wondering if there isn't something totally different we should be doing, but I can't figure out what.
--Nathan
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