Dreams

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Those funny and sometimes scary images that come to you in your sleep. Do you have any idea what they mean? Do you know why we forget them so fast?

Me neither. Do I look like a psychotherapist?

After a couple of years of emotional ups and downs I’ve started paying attention to my dreams and this is what I found.

If I sleep all night, usually going to be late and waking in the morning, I don’t remember any dreams. If I sleep for a few hours, then wake up and get up and do something then go back to sleep, I dream.

Most of my dreams are monochromatic but there are a few muted colors that sometimes show up.

 

I dream about old buildings or houses. Have for a long time. Don’t know why. The only old house I can remember that I was ever in as I recall was my grandfathers house in North Carolina when I was about 5 years old. It was an old Victorian with huge furniture and a musty old person’s smell about it. I never went upstairs and the downstairs was dark with the curtains drawn. Maybe that was it? Or maybe all the black and white horror movies I watched as a kid. They all were in castles or old shadowed filled houses.

So we have these old buildings. Sometimes I am outside of these buildings. They are like neighborhoods I’ve seen or ridden by but in a previous time. People are walking the streets and there is no traffic. Around the turn of the century I’d say. There is always an air or feeling that I’m in a place I shouldn’t be in.

 

Sometimes the buildings are an office I used to work in but decades earlier than I was there. And there are always these long hallways or stairs I have to explore on my way to?

 

It seems most of my dreams are about solving a problem. Can’t find this thing or must go somewhere else to do something important or contact someone else about a problem. That is easy to analyze since that is what I always did at work. I had many titles but mainly I was a problem solver. No not rocket science or the cure for the plague, mine was trying to find a way to get a message to people reading the local newspaper that this store or this product or some service was worth them stopping their busy day and spend their hard-earned dough. After management training, which didn’t mean a thing in the “real” world, the problems became more intense because they were all about personnel. Those were complicated as putting a square peg in a round hole.

 

The other night I had this dream about a house full of people. There must have been a party or something because I felt crowded. Some people are familiar to me while others are complete strangers. Then I realized. I don’t see faces. I never see faces. I sense who these people are but never recognize them by their face and they don’t talk. We communicate through some strange thought-wave telecommunication.

 

I don’t usually have amorous dreams but this one turned into one. An old girlfriend was at this….”gathering” and I started flirting with her. Again, I never saw her face but I knew her by her touch. Yeah, I can touch in these dreams. This wasn’t one of those teenage dreams of the mystery girl but as we rolled around on a bed she communicated to me in whatever manner we communicate asking me if I would paint her. My first thought, in this dream, was “What color?”

Later she went out the door in an overcoat with some others, laughing and in a hurry. I was heartbroken. I must need a date.

 

I don’t have nightmares but I used to wake up suddenly in a cold sweat. At least that is what my wife used to say but I was in a different frame of mine then. I don’t dream of monsters or falling but I do have a fear of vertigo so I pull back from edges pretty quickly.

There are hundreds of thousands of books and papers that suggest what these images mean but only we can truly relate these dreams to our living experience. Perhaps they are the mind resorting our thoughts and feelings? Maybe we are just reliving painful or happy occasions from this or a previous life? Freud said they are all about sex. Maybe so, everything is about sex but that was a previous post.

 

So at the end of the day, we never know what little movies our mind may or may not present to us. Each of us has these little stories going on in our heads and they exclusively for us. We can try to describe them to someone else but most of the time they fade away from conscience memory before we can write down the details. And as dedicated someone else may be trying to interpret them for us, we are the only ones who knows what the dreams really mean.

This is wearying me out. I need a nap.