Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Dream Diary

Back when I was pregnant with my first baby, and when he was very small, I kept a dream diary for about a year.

This was largely because I'm fascinated by the way the rules of the dream universe differ from the rules of reality universe (things can suddenly transform, and your objectives can suddenly change, and yet the dream universe rules aren't totally arbitrary). Plus I had the fantasy of writing a dream-universe graphic novel, a bit along the lines of Little Nemo in Slumberland.

Then, going back to work (and having a fixed wake-up-and-get-to-the-office time) kind of put a stop to taking the time to remember what I dreamed.

Lately, I've tried to start one up again, with some success, but I've met with some obstacles:

For one thing, a lot of my dreams are so embarrassing that I don't even want to write them down. Yeah, I know that the advantage of leaving Mormonism is that your journal is for yourself and not for the scriptures of the angels, but still! I don't want to feel like I have to burn my dream diary well in advance of my death to avoid having it read by posterity...

Secondly, all of my somewhat-less-embarrassing dreams seem to involve missing flights! It's weird!!! I don't think I fly that often, so I can't figure out why every other dream I remember seems to be about how I lost the info about where and when I need to go to catch XYZ flight to wherever, and maybe I can't get to the airport in time, etc....

Does anyone else have this problem, or is it just me?

5 comments:

Goldarn said...

When I was younger I used to have nightmares about those bird-like martians from Bugs Bunny. I still don't know that that one means.

C. L. Hanson said...

Hey Goldarn!!!

I'm not sure myself....

Varina said...

When I am in school I often have these weird anxiety dreams where I have forgotten I was taking a class and it is now the week before finals and I have all this work to catch up on...
It seems kind of similar in feeling to the missing flight dream, anxiety about something that is not really going to happen, but seems close enough to real life to be disturbing

C. L. Hanson said...

Hey Sabayon!!!

Another friend of mine said the same thing -- that it's anxiety. And, in my case in particular, it's probably because I'm stressed about trying to organize two panels for the Sunstone Symposium in July. Like catching a plane, it's something that's not really difficult, yet it's very possible to make a mistake and screw it up. ;)

(You should come to Sunstone, BTW -- it is going to be loads of fun!!! We're going to have a big group of exmos in attendance, with parties, etc.!)

It's weird, though, that "trying not to miss a flight" is sort of my subconscious's go-to theme for anxiety dreams, since I don't fly that often, and I would much rather travel by train, when possible. (Of course, perhaps that's exactly why flight = anxiety...).

I was recently telling my son Leo that it annoys me that I so often dream of travelling by air and never by train, and Leo reminded me that I'd once told him about a dream I'd had about super-fast trains. I had dreamt that the trams of Zurich had gotten out of control, and were zipping around the city so fast that it was impossible to cross the street without getting run over. lol, that was a fun dream.

Oh well, at least those "missing a flight" dreams aren't nearly as annoying as the "looking for a bathroom" dreams, which I truly hate...

Karen said...

I often have bizarre dreams located at the first place I worked,a military contractor where the cubicle walls were grungy and there was duct tape holding sections of the carpet together. (The work was fantastically interesting.) The narrative of the dreams is always different, but the grungy cubicles and tape-ridden carpet are always the same. Go figure.