Dream along with me ...

Welcome to my nightmare!

I know that’s not original, so I must acknowledge Alice Cooper. Consider yourself acknowledged, Alice.

But, welcome, nevertheless. I will begin with an apology. Sometimes when people describe their dreams to one, one realizes in short order that the dream is more interesting to the dreamer than it is to the listener. But, here goes, anyway.

I dream quite vividly, and in color. In this, however, I am not going to look at the mundane dreams, but will look at exceptional dreams, more specifically, nightmares. And most specifically, one particular nightmare. But first I want to find out whether others have experienced a slightly different dream phenomenon, and that is one known by various names, but commonly, the ‘waking dream.’

Waking dreams are those that lose the surreal watermarks of conventional dreams, but instead offer a logic and scene so vivid that the dreamer finds it difficult to differentiate the dream from reality.

I have had two or three of those, if I recall, with the most recent being the most noteworthy. Here goes:

It was a few weeks after my second wife and I had split. I had moved to an apartment. I was in a state of considerable distress. I had no desire for the marriage to come to an end, despite the tension-fraught months leading to the split. I thought we could work things out. I still believe we could have if the will had been there. It wasn’t – on her part. It wasn’t until later I realized that I was just another bit-player in her relationship legacy. But, that doesn’t matter.

Anyway, I was highly distressed to have been ejected by a woman I loved deeply, and her daughter, whom I parentally adored. I slept one night. And then, there I was, back at the house we shared. I was there to pick up some clothes that were still in my closet. She let me in, through the garage door (I don’t know why). The house was in semi-darkness. I recall her saying little to me. I passed by the living room and my stepdaughter was sitting and staring into space. She didn’t acknowledge me. To make a long story short, I got my stuff and I split, with a feeling of great depression. All around, indoors and out, was dull and dingy, suiting my mood. And then I was back in my own bed in my dreary little apartment. I was utterly confounded because everything had been so realistic; people, time, place and movement. I could have sworn that it had really happened, and it remains in my mind that it was virtually a real event.
South Sea islanders believe our dreams are real, and they are just another aspect of our lives.

The nightmare I mentioned was one that took place when I was about seven. It’s only notable that after so many years, I still remember it with absolute clarity. I am in the basement, at my father’s workshop. He is labouring away on some power tool or other. He has bought me a dog. A black and white sort of Springer spaniel pup. It’s very cute, and I loved dogs. I am happy they have got me a dog. I go to leave the workshop when the dog’s face assumes a fiendish bearing and it reaches out with some sort of hand-like appendage and grabs my ankle. The dog is under some basement rubbish and is trying to drag me under the rubbish. I am terrified. I call to my father for help, but the machinery noise makes him ignore me. I drag myself to the basement stairs, with the dog still holding me, laboriously move up the stairs and look around the corner. My mother is in the kitchen, chopping vegetables. I cry out to her, but she seems oblivious and ignores me, just as my father had. The dog drags me down the stairs.

At that point, I guess I awakened, in stark terror. Terror enough that my dream scenario still is with me. You could read all sorts of psychological origins into that dream; fear of rejection being the most prominent. Rejection by parents who were rarely demonstrably loving, and therefore never earned my trust. Truly they didn’t, but that’s a whole other story.

OK. So there are my dreams. If you have had any notable dreams or nightmares you’d be willing to share, I’d like to read about them. If you've had the same ones I had, now that wouild be really nightmarish.