Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Dreamin'

Hello, blog. It's been almost a year since I started. Time to dust off the keyboard and jump back in.

I think freudulently should be a word. For example, when I typed (and later deleted) 'time for a kick up the arse,' I accidentally typed 'dick.' Well, no one's perfect and my autopilot mind tends to be rather foul-mouthed. That's fine. But what I would like to now be able to say is, "...I freudulently typed, with rather dull results." Yes, Freudian works but there seems to be no adverb. We need to get a team onto this.

But I digress.

I've been trying to remember as much of my dreams as possible lately, feeling in some way that if they're going to make it so hard for me to wake up at all, I might as well take the hint and pay attention. In the grip of a strong dream, I'll sleep through fire alarms and attempted burglaries. Resetting my alarm clock is no problem. If someone calls on the phone, I'll have a perfectly lucid conversation with them only to remember nothing of it when I finally wake up hours later - as if drenched by a bucked of cold water - "20 minutes to get to work!"

The last big dream I had was after a day when two main things happened: first, I was mopey and despondent, wallowing in my relationship status long designated "forever alone"; second, I went out with a friend and met a really nice young man. There was cider and chips. We exchanged numbers and I've sent a few text messages. Nothing momentous, but very, very unexpected and nice.

So that night, I had this dream, the main feature of which was this revelation that the stars were not in actual fact up in the heavens, far away and ethereal. Instead, lying in my bed and looking up at them, I realised that they had in fact been painted on. They'd been painted on by the same creative effects team who had worked on the musical episode of 'Buffy The Vampire Slayer.'

And as I watched the bow and arrow of Sagittarius appear as if by magic (but now as I knew, painted on invisibly and illuminated by fluorescent light wires mixed in with luminescent bug juice synthetic composite), I couldn't stop staring. There was a sense of dissonance that I couldn't look away from. It was like looking into the sun. It made my eyes water.

Later that day, after I'd woken, I was filled with this a strange sense of sadness. I felt like someone had just told me there was no such person as Santa Claus. Somehow, letting go of a particular way of understanding the world. There was for much of the day a sense that the rug had been pulled out from underneath me a little bit. Time to leave Narnia, kids, and this time you can't come back because you're too old. Bittersweet loss.

Later, it occurred to me that it was the proximity of the stars that was the major point of interest in the dream. They were still there after all and they were still stars; they were still beautiful and shiny and captivating, and I was still unable to look away from them. But they were less bright and closer as opposed to really bright and far away. Less glossy, more attainable.

So in terms of interpretation, I'm going with the obvious. My subconscious tends not to be subtle. The stars most likely represent dreams and ambitions - the Holy Grail of 'emotional fulfilment,' which I've been given to understand (with notable resentment and a growing sense of deficiency) requires the involvement of another human being in my life and on a romantic level. My perception of the relationships of other people as being all perfectmagicHollywood and emphatically 'not for me' was revealed in this dream as not a thing that actually exists in this universe. The fake stars never existed.

So while the 8-year-old Disney princess wannabe part of me felt oddly betrayed by social myths of happily ever after, the rest of me, once I realised the dream's connection with the skewed way I'd been seeing the world and actually understood and felt that revelation ontologically rather than superficially, felt quite liberated and refreshed.

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