Saturday, March 15, 2008

Dreams

I’d really like to know what my subconscious has been trying to tell me these last few nights.

I’ve had a lot of strange dreams recently, which actually is quite normal for me. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t have vivid dreams that most people would probably label nightmares, but to me have a gleam of fascination to them. However, even I am unsettled by my dreams sometimes and last night I had three very unsettling dreams.

I usually don’t write my dreams down here, for fear that people will read into them and interpret them, correctly or incorrectly, and then have (or think they have) an upper hand by understanding parts of me that I don’t understand myself.

So this is an unprecedented event.

First I dreamt that I was getting married. I never saw the groom, and the wedding actually never happened in my dream. In the dream I was getting the photos taken. We were in Greece (and when I say we, I just mean the people in my dream, not all of whom I know. My friend L. was there, and so was my youngest brother, and perhaps my mother at the beginning, but I think the rest were strangers) and I wanted to get the group photos taken in this bend in the mountainous road where there was a beautiful background of another mountain and a lake. It was 6:00 in the evening, and the sun was setting behind the mountain. The wedding party wasn’t all there yet, because some of them were getting ready and some were on their way but were kind of lost. Youngest Brother was on his cell phone telling them they had to drive through the village and we were just on the other side of it. Finally everyone was there but the sun had set and we took the pictures in the dark, with the stars and moon as a backdrop. I did see some buildings before the sun set, and some people. I was content and completely relaxed, but the buildings and people had a sobering effect on me. They were not good, but not a danger to me in that moment. The groom never materialized, even in the pictures. I’m actually not sure he was ever there.

Then I dreamt of a young pregnant girl. She was blonde and lovely and innocent looking, and about five months along. She was in a prison in this horrible place (perhaps the buildings I had seen in the wedding dream) – she had been imprisoned because she was an unwed mother-to-be. This place was very conservative, cultish almost, and it was like it was the middle ages or something, technologically. It was all dirty and poorly lit. The jailer, a big brutish man, sliced open her belly and took her baby, which died because it was too young to be taken out yet. The girl staggered. He took her baby away, which was wrapped in dirty white swaddling right from the moment it came out. The girl got out of the jail when he went away with the infant but she was weak and she died. She was laid out on a table and her body was packed with cocaine, which you could see from the wound in her belly. She had been laid out with care but I don’t know who did it. The table was rough wood. Some of the people from this place found her and sat around the table and began to eat the cocaine from her womb. It was all over their faces, white powder, and in their mouths, and their eyes were stupid. They were grubby and stuffing their faces with cocaine, feasting like the dwarves in The Last Battle, with no grace or gentility but all crudeness and selfishness and greed, sitting around the table where the dead girl was laid. They didn’t even know what they were eating, they were just stuffing their faces with it. They all died of it, and sat there, slumped with their eyes dead and closed, all sitting dead in their chairs around the dead girl on the table, and it was all very still. Then, from having watched this all unfold without being a part of it, I became embodied in the dream. I was the dead girl’s mother. I was on a horse (brown, I think) and I was dressed in flowing feminine robes with a scarf masking my face like an Arabian harem girl or princess. I was beautiful and older, and filled with grief as I searched and searched for my daughter. I was a demi-goddess and although I knew the previous content of the dream I was still searching for someone to tell me the story, to tell me where I could find my daughter. I was so full of sorrow and grief and pain for my daughter and her dead child! One boy, who was almost a man but not quite yet, told me what he knew and I think he directed me to where he thought she had been buried but I didn’t ever see a grave. I was mourning and my beautiful face was full of sorrow, and it was still somehow very beautiful.

Then I dreamt that I was in a large house, although I only went into a few rooms of it. I was there with my friend R., and maybe L. and S. were there too, and perhaps one of my brothers although I don’t know which one or if they were there at all in the first place. There was a covered deck around three sides of the house but I was only on one side. The deck was screened in. There was a porch that came out onto the deck. It had large windows in the upper half of the walls but the bottom was normal wall, although at times it had the feeling of being a glass room. There was an ill-fitting door between this porch and the rest of the house. The porch jutted out all the way to the edge of the deck, effectively cutting the deck apart. There was another ill-fitting door from the porch to the deck, and on this side of the porch was a huge white dog. It was friendly like all large untrained dogs are – overwhelming and messy and unintentionally rough. I had to make the door stay shut by lifting it and turning the deadbolt into its hole so the dog wouldn’t get in, because we knew that if we were with it, it would turn nasty and bite us and perhaps try to kill us. There was a gun cabinet outside with the big white dog, and I tried to reach the cabinet to get the .22 and bullets so I could shoot the dog, but I couldn’t quite reach. If you went into the house, there was a kitchen and another door that led outside to the other side of the deck, where there was another dog. It was smaller, and a duller white (or perhaps a light dirty blonde) and it was well behaved and trained. It sat quietly and was quite reserved and didn’t send off friendly signals at all – it seemed quite intellectual and reserved, but it was safe. I was put out that I couldn’t get the gun to shoot the big stupid dangerous dog and everyone in the kitchen was playing cards and didn’t really care, even though the doors were rickety and if the dangerous dog stopped being friendly it could break in.

Then I woke up.

I don’t know what these dreams mean. My dad bought me a dream book a while back, and it isn’t very accurate – I think dreams are usually quite specific to the person dreaming them although there are some universal symbols that we all seem to hold in our collective consciousness. I do look up the symbols and read the ‘meanings’, though more for entertainment then for real knowledge, and according to that book, these dreams hold multiple signals that I am going to be betrayed by a friend, someone I least suspect.

I don’t know if I believe that.

I have been told by people I’m more inclined to believe that death in dreams usually means change; children mean new life, or a new creative project; pregnancy means the birth of creativity. Since those are the aspects of these dreams that stick out to me the most, I wonder. A child died. A young woman died too, and people ate death from her womb.

Put that way, no wonder I’m a bit disturbed.

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