LaughAloud

Joyous Multitudes

In my dream, I am wandering through sandy dunes. This is the part of the beach, far from the shore where the beach grasses grow in clumps and small sandy hills have formed, covered with brownish green growth. A few larger plants, not quite trees, not quite bushes sprout here and there. Sandy paths weave amoung the dunes, and on one of these I walk. To my left, on a parallel path, is my companion, a great cat, padding along softly. Beyond him, over a dune, the sand slops gently down the ocean. Suddenly, ahead of us, I see two large animals. My dream mind tells me they are badgers, but they are as large as lions, one with a bushy tail half the length of its body. I freeze. I am terrified, In spite of my companion, I am afraid they will attack. We are invaders in their land, but they haven't noticed us yet and I watch them as they move slowly amoung the grass. There is a flurry of movement to my left, three animals, something like a monkey, on the smaller side, something more like a gazelle, maybe a giraffe. The monkey dashes forward, charging at the badgers and I am frightened for him, and frightened for me, almost in the middle of what looks like it will become a bloody battle. But the monkey slows just before reaching the badger and reaches out a hand and strokes her head, and she is happy. And the monkey twirls around and begins to dance and suddenly I am surrounded by animals on all sides and they are all moving, dancing, I can hear the music they dance to and their movements are some mix of human and animals and they reach out to me to join them. All my fear is washed away and I join in, becoming part of this beautiful and joyous multitude.

Snippet of a Dream

I am returning an old rifle to the graveyard of the National Archives. I am walking, the rifle in my hands. I enter the through the gate, on the side of the building, and I walk through the graves. I am looking for grave number 1339. When I arrive, there are men standing there, waiting to take the rifle. I look at the grave, there is a list of names, maybe 7 men, all monks buried in this grave. The man I handed the rifle to opens up a slot in the stone, and returns the rifle to where it belongs. Why I even had it, I don't know. I start to make my way back to the outside, toward the gate, but I get lost. I am no longer outside, but wandering through great hallways, small rooms, marble surrounds me. The hallways turn to tunnels, the rooms get smaller. I feel I am coming to the center. A dark door opens up onto spaciousness and light. I should not be here, it is forbidden. I close the door, but I want to see inside, what is held there, in the great light openness? But I turn away, make my way back through the darkness, find my way to the outside. I tell the people I find there of my trouble finding the way out, my encounter with the center. They stare at me in awe. No one can find the center they say. Only the Questseeker can be lead to the center. You, they say, you must be the Questseeker.

Dream a Little Dream

I am on a ladder, shoving documents onto the top shelf, hiding them under other books. There are soldiers with guns all over the library. Demanding specific documents be removed and handed over. One approaches me, still on the ladder, and demands we hand over the Census CDs from earlier than 1990. The same CDs that stopped working the week before. They've infiltrated the software, not just come in person demanding we turn over documents.

Once they've removed whatever government information they are trying to suppress, we are loaded onto a bus. The bus is full, are they all from the library? I'm not sure, but the buss is full. We stop for gas, and get out, stretch our legs, buy supplies. It does not feel like we are prisoners. We continue on our journey, to where we're not sure. We make another stop and this time and the military brass and the suit who have been on the bus with us, get off. They speak with one of the soldiers off the bus. He gets back on big gun in hand. Somehow, we know, he's been ordered to kill us.

But he doesn't. What we do to convince him not to kill us is unclear. Instead, they are going to break our hands. Just one hand each.

We're no longer on the bus, but waiting, huddled on the floor of an empty building. They take 3 of us at a time into a room. Use a hammer, smash a finger at a time, while the rest of us sit outside and listen and wait for our turn to come. Through all of this, I somehow manage to sleep. When I wake, Chip is there with me and he has brought me different clothes. He says he knows how much I like the ones I'm wearing, and he doesn't want them ruined by the blood. And I know then, I'm ready, I'm prepared knowing they're going to break my hand in such a way, I know I'll probably never be able to use it again, or at least not for a long time. And I decide, or rather, I know, I will give him my right hand. And it feels surreal because my left hand was always the less important, the extra, the helper. And in half my life it still is. But without my left hand, I wouldn't be able to shoot my bow.

And I prepare to give my right hand over to the hammer.

Last Night's Dream of After the End

A permanent winter had fallen upon the world, feet of snow insulating the ground, falling, always falling. Whether because of the extreme winter, or some other disaster, people had begun retreating to underground caves and living there, with some of the old comforts. Hoarding artifacts of the past in the hopes that someday someone would find them. The caves were warm and not so different from our old homes. We had stoves and light, furniture. More like cozy, underground hobbit house than caves.

I am standing in front of a deep stone wall of the cave in which we live. I run my hand over the carvings made by a friend now gone, who had themselves studied the ancient cave paintings. (Who this friend was and what happened to them, I can't quite grasp.) These carvings were done "before" in the hopes of creating a lasting record of our myths and history. The fear being that it would be so long into our future before people again had the luxury to study the past instead of just surviving the future, that only the stone would be sure to survive.

We have an entrance on each end of the cave, tunnels that climb up towards the cold. One entrance collapses. We try to dig it out, to squeeze out towards the light, but it is solid and we are left with only one way out to the world. And this is only the beginning. Other caves begin to collapse, leaving people trapped and dying underground. And the decision is made, for everyone to move out of the caves, away from the last remnants of comfort and technology, of our lost civilization. And we leave the artifacts of our past behind. The books and music and carving on the cave walls. Leave them behind in the hopes that someday people will find the things we left behind and learn of what was in the "before." And out  we go, into the new cold world and try to survive in the new winter.

Nothing Left

What would you take with you if you had to suddenly leave your home and never return?

We had to consider this briefly and rather abstractly during the fires in October, but it never became real.  The fires were miles away, and we were never really threatened with evacuation.  But I still thought about because, well, it was a possibility, however distant.

Last night I had a dream there was going to be a flood...we considered staying, but then realized we needed to flee the city and go north where we would be safe from the flood...The rain had already started and we had lost electricity, and water was already starting to come into the house.  We had to choose the things we should take, only what would fit in our car.  Not just the things we didn't want to leave behind, but the things we would need to survive.

Strange dream, but still, the possibility exists that all of us might one day have to choose which of our worldly possessions to pack into our cars and leave with. One story I heard during the fires, was about a family who had packed their two cars with all that was most important to them, and fled their house as the fires approached.  The fire wall made a strange turn and trapped them, they escaped just before their cars were engulfed in flames.  Their house never burned.

What to take to start over.  The two things that come to my mind first are photographs and our computers.  Although I would partially want my computer because it is a large part of the way I connect to the world, it is mostly what is stored on my computer and external hard drive that I would want to save...and it really boils down again to photographs, thousands and thousands of photos from the last seven years of my life that are almost exclusively digital.  Chip has started talking about backing up much of our data on an external server.  On the one hand this means in theory someone else could access it, but it also means the likelihood of losing it because of the destruction or corruption of our personal computers goes down dramatically.  Disasters (natural and otherwise) are largely personal and localized.  With all our most important data stored in some remote location, even if we lose everything, we can still save many of our tangible memories.  We do live in an amazing world.

Water or Rail?

Sometime early this morning, I would guess 4 or 5 am, I heard a loud bellowing horn.  I could tell it was distant, but it was still loud enough to wake me, and I'm not a light sleeper. I've heard this horn at least once before since we've moved, and both times, I've thought it was ships in the harbor blowing their fog horns. 

This morning when I heard it, wanted to go over into the window and look out to see if it was foggy.  I didn't, but I dreamt about it.  I walked over to the window, and in my dream, I could see the ships in port at the harbor, and the fog was lifting and they were zooming away into the morning.  Someone was telling me how their aunt knew the fog was going to lift and kept waiting for the ships to change their schedules to leave early in the morning.  I counted the ships I saw leaving, so I could report how many (9) left in the few moments I stood at the window. 

So of course after my dream, I was sure it had been ships in the harbor making that noise, but when i mentioned it to Chip, he said he thought it was a train.  The harbor is two miles away, and the closest train tracks I've been able to find on a map run along the shore, so I guess it could go either way.  I'll have to find where there is a marine weather report, and start looking at that on the mornings I hear the horn, and try to prove my case. :)

Dreams

For a while when I was in college, I kept a dream journal.  When I started, I didn't remember very much, and many days didn't remember anything at all.  But you would be surprised how much you remember if you just spend five minutes every morning thinking about, and remembering your dreams.  There's that brief window between sleep and awake when the worlds cross and you can be in both at once.  That's when you have to remember.  I haven't really kept my dream journal for a long time, although every now and then, I write down an interesting dream.  But my brain is still kind of trained to remember more than it used to pre-dream journal. 

Yesterday, I found a slip of paper where I'd written down brief snippets of a dream about a month or so ago.  Here are the snippets I remembered the morning of:

• I was related to Andrew Johnson (or more specifically, he was my ancestor)
• One of my brothers died in the bathroom and little animals ate half of him (don't worry brothers, it wasn't a specific brother, it was a non-real dream brother who didn't represent any of you.)
• snowball fight, before I had seen snow
• buying a David Bowie shirt
• I had a job drawing topographic maps

I think the first and last on the list are my favorites to have a dream of.

Random Thought on Dreams

Often when I lie down to go to sleep at night, I'll get the briefest flash of my dreams from the night before.  Last night I remembered a dream that involved something about trying to take the bus somewhere and waiting a long time, and eventually just walking because the bus was taking so long, and I was worried about being late. 

This snippet of dream got me thinking. Thinking about public transportation in my dreams. How its a common thread that reoccurs with some frequency. In my real life, I have really missed being able to take public transportation everywhere since moving from Chicago, and living in Chicago was really the first time I did take it everywhere. In Chicago is also the first time I remember dreaming about public transportation.

Chip and I spent a weekend in Chicago looking for an apartment about a month before we moved. On Saturday morning we planned to take the El to an apartment finding service start our search. The night before I dreamt of the El - I think of getting lost on it - but in a very adventure disaster fun sort of way.  It was born out of anxiety I'm sure - I didn't know yet what a friend the train could be.

Last night in my half awake, half asleep state, I thought how funny it was I dream so much (relatively speaking) about public transportation, and the El in particular. But it was one of the things that made Chicago feel like home, and with that in mind, its not so strange.

Dreaming

I thought we had gotten to the airport with plenty of time to spare.  Our flight wasn't till 8:40.  My watch said 6:13, and Chip's said the same.  Then I noticed a clock on the wall that said 8:13.  We weren't even through security yet.  I started to panic.  Different clocks had different times; there seemed to be confusion from everyone around us about what time it really was.  Somehow I just knew we had only a little time left, and we ran to get through security and get to our plane.  The lines were short and somehow we made it just in time.

I had a window seat. I don't remember if Chip sat next to me. We were leaving from Phoenix and flying to Cuba. We were supposed to be. I remember things still felt wrong. The sound of the plane, the land we flew over; nothing seemed quite right. 

Then we were descending. Too fast. But almost like we were floating. The land below was tropical, blue waters smattered with sandy islands and palm trees. It got closer and closer. I had a moment of panic when I thought we would go down in the ocean and I imagined the water closing in around the plane.  Stuck inside, while I looked out the window and we sank slowly down.

But we didn't, we made it, barely to land, just skimming the water. The landing wasn't rough, we sank down onto the sand, gliding in slowly.  No one seemed to be afraid. We all got out slowly. But the plane had flown in the wrong direction. We were in China. Stuck there. Didn't how how we would get home.

Then I woke up. These are the best dreams to have a couple nights before you fly. Don't you think?

A Crazy Dream

The other night I had the craziest dream.  There was a party in a building, tall with lots of glass.  Then there was a disaster.  Lots of snow, cars getting stuck.  I don’t know if the snow was the disaster, or if there was more, but it was cold and there was lots of snow. 

There was a horse, a deep shining chestnut mare.  Telepathic.   Spoke to me, but I was not me, I was someone else.  Spoke to others, maybe?  But  she told me more.  I cradled her head close to me and breathed in the sweet smell of her, and stroked her silken nose.

In the midst of the disaster my family, who was not my family, sat around a table and ate a simple dinner and where we sat was warm and light and this was “the happiness.”  But the others did not know it and we were surrounded by the cold and the snow.  People around us, panicking, running away from something terrible, but separate from our table and from the light.

My father, who was not my father, but a small asian man who was the father of the me in my dream, stood and tried to leave the table.  Tried to gather the family, so we too could run.  But I stopped him.  I told him “No.  We must perform the happiness.”  And I didn’t have to tell him what the happiness was, or that it was the horse who told me.  He knew.  She made him know, although he didn’t know how. 

And we sat down again, at our table in the sun, and ate.  And around us the people ran terrified and the snow came down and down.

And when I awoke, I felt so peaceful.  So happy.