Wednesday, November 17, 2010

To sleep, perchance to dream

I didn't quote the rest of that because as far as I'm concerned there is no downside to dreaming. And I dreamt so particularly well last night that I'm going to blog about dreaming. Oh, and I skipped blogging about food on Tuesday because the meal was only half successful; steak tips in red wine butter sauce. Sauce was awesome, steak sucked. Figures - I have a terrible track record for steak cooking. Anyway, back to today's entry:

I’ve been through some tough things in my life (divorce) some really tough things (death and dismemberment. Ok, not the latter but it’s been close a couple of times) some odd things (falling down a mud well at a Haitian construction site) and some pretty cool stuff (everything else).

You’d think the divorce would be the worst thing, or possibly the second worse thing, to have happen. You’d be wrong. Shortly after the whole break up I went through – suffered through – two dreamless weeks. Yes, it is likely that I did dream, but simply didn't remember them. But as far as I’m concerned the former without the latter is pointless.

The thing is, I’d been married 8 years when it ended. And yes, it ended in a particularly bad way, but I’d lived twenty something years without being married so going back to that wasn’t terrible, it just took time. And I had one of the best childhoods you can imagine, and my family was wonderful so recovering from the break-up took time, but I did get over it. I’ve no idea where people who grew up in horrible circumstances find the wherewithal to get over a horrible marriage. Man, I’m lucky.

Dreaming, though, that’s a different story. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t dream, and dream well. I have lucid dreams (where you know you’re dreaming, and can even occasionally direct the dream) hallucinatory dreams (sane people having hallucinations is not that unusual; normally happens when you’re under intense stress or fatigue) and once – sort of – a prophetic dream*.

For years I wrote down my dreams, which helps with being able to instigate lucid dreaming, by the way. I’ve had one dream that is a long drawn out story dreamt over a number of years. I haven’t dreamt the next chapter yet (it’s been a year, at least) but I’m sure it will come along some time. I’ve thought about writing a book based on those dreams, but when you read through them you can tell what books I’d been reading and what movies I’d been watching. I’d be in court for plagiarism a dozen times. Great dream sequence, though, I loved it. Yes, I typed them out and saved them electronically. I want to be able to go over them when I’m old and grey.

So you can see how important dreams are to me. When they disappeared for those two weeks, I had no idea if it was a permanent change. And the thought that it might be almost killed me. No more saving the world dreams? No more time travel dreams? No more epic Lord of the Rings like dreams? What kind of life is that? And the break-up of a marriage is a not-good thing but losing an entire life of adventure and travel…not to be born. Suffice it to say that when the dreams returned I knew that life would eventually get back on track, and all was well with the world.

*In retrospect, it was merely a case of knowing deep down that something was not right in my world, and that worry coming out in a dream. When my world did fall apart two weeks after a nightmare of impending disaster I thought “Wow - a dream that saw the future!” Nope, turns out I just had a better idea of what was going on than I’d thought.

No comments:

Post a Comment