Mr. Sandman

I was reading an essay by the lovely and talented blogger over at Gropius vs Eddie the other day on the topic of dreams. These things stay with me, the thoughts tumble and rearrange themselves in the back of my consciousness long after the catalyst, in this case, the blog, introduces the idea. So naturally I’ve been thinking about dreams for the past couple of days.

I tend to think I have an active dream world, but just don’t usually remember them when I awake. I rise around 5am with a predefined morning agenda and the dreams just stay in dreamland. But this morning as I was making coffee and tending to a few casual chores, several of my dreams from last night reemerged in a flash. The colors, the characters, the images, the feelings. It was a tangled mess, as dreams usually are, one situation merging with another seemingly unrelated one.

Some highlights:

• A house with a barricaded stairway leading to an unfinished second floor. No doorway exists to the 2nd floor, but there is a small hole in that wall. Creepy.


• My dogs sneak past the barricade, dash upstairs and squeeze through the hole. I peek up the stairway just in time to see the last one hop through the hole. Stress.


• I’m rummaging through a kitchen drawer and find a dozen or so forgotten paring knives that I need to add to my own kitchen “knife” drawer that is already rather full of knives. Stress.


• I’m walking down a sidewalk and come to a tree with lovely, gauzy, fragrant white blossoms. I feel compelled to lie on the grass beneath the tree and watch the honey bees darting from branch to branch. Relaxing, but creepy.


• I’m walking down a nearby alley, picking my way between puddles in the uneven pavement, and my cell phone rings. It’s a fictitious woman that I met only once, but she’s calling for Cristy, not me. WTF?


• I have meticulously arranged dozens of dinner plates and salad plates in stacks on a table, inside a storage rack that is not at all very stable. It might fall apart at any moment. What was I thinking?


• I’m wearing panties and a little vest and a female police officer is swiping a baby wipe under my arms. Again, WTF?

All I can say is that I am glad I usually don’t remember my dreams. If this is a representative sample of my personal dreamworld, then it is just packed way too full of stressful and unnecessarily puzzling situations.