...are vastly different than the rules of the day.
Why does the instantly recognizable sensibility of even the oddest of dreams makes sense within itself, in context, tucked tight to the dream?
For a few moments, it all jibes. But I find that - within minutes of waking, still wiping the sleep from my eyes - those rules that made so much sense in the dream-state fade away. The fog of reality obscures the once articulate landscape. That bridge to illusion/creation is engulfed, smothered by the waking assault of the senses.
I've tried explaining this before, this lost world of loose cohesion, the falling of the context from view and analysis. (Mostly to my dogs, who never have any useful input on that.) The videographic portions of the dream - with their vivid natural imagery, impossible physics, deep symbology and seeming randomness - reduce in both quality and quantity. The conversations, the colors, the 4-D beauty, the people you've never seen that populate the backgrounds - they all fade so quickly that I often feel as if I'm unfairly losing important, hard-fought wisdom. (Ripped off by being awake and coming back to the conscious reality of warm pillows and stretching dogs, idling busses and alerting crows. It seems so blatantly unfair to supplant 'the dream morsels' with the diesel-dusty fondue of the urban world.)
The 'lost recipe' of the dream is no longer accessible, unless you keep a journal, and write all the details as soon as you can. (Who? What? Where? Weirdness? Symbols? Emotions? Breakthroughs?) I spit them all onto a page as soon as I can, when I can.
Some things/ideas keep cropping up, so I can see what's going on in my subconscious, if only in a very shallow way.
Are the relative themes of repeated dreams to be trusted?
First, in relation to 'her,' were years of 'searching dreams.' The frustration of 'seeking and never finding' was compounded when I awakened, when I realized I was only looking for her in my subconscious, milking the old memories, grasping for answers that I somehow knew I'd never get.
In the rules of the dream, she'd leave a relevant clue, or an indirect message, and I'd go on an exhausting wild-coyote chase looking for her, through fantasy landscapes of an overly-coloured Maxfield Parrish nature to halls and doors of sterile institutions in cities that don't actually exist, to Thai temple compounds with icons that - when overlaid - told me the story's moral. Sometimes the scene involved actual places, but with unreal additions and embellishments. Her hometown often looked like a medieval village in my subconscious, with the accompanying townsfolk and their requisite disdain for the modernized, techno world. Idealized to the extreme, dream elements only make sense in self-reference. I thought it was a quaint place, and my subconscious piled on 'the fixin's' that made it evade the common sense of my waking mind. It became mysterious and blurry and important. (But it isn't, it's just a memory caught in a whorl of Brownian motion, folding in on itself.)
Some of the elements that make up my 'dream mirepois' include having a personal weapon of some sort that I inevitably lose in the dream. Most often, probably because I was in the Army and often carried a .45 cal M-1911 pistol for extended periods, that's the weapon I usually have. I know it well, its weight, its cool bulk, the smell of gun oil, the manly sounds of charging and releasing the slide. Oftentimes, I'm in flak-jacket armor and have a few reliable knives on my person as well. Since the pistol is usually inexplicably lost during the dream, I wake up 'missing' my weapon, worried about it falling into the wrong hands, a deadly potential that I have responsibility for...
What does it mean to dream-carry a weapon you don't own? And to worry about its loss?
I'm not a dream therapist, but that missing pistol is a powerful symbol. Is it about losing a vital tool? Or a vital connection? Or, is it about losing a piece of my comfort and security?
Another recurring theme or flavor involves being so jet-lagged that I forget if I'm awake or asleep. I've experienced that at times, during the Asia building bubble of the late 90's. In the dreams, and they do re-occur with some frequency, I end up in West Africa, giving a manila package to a rather rotund man of obvious import. I remember falling asleep on flights from Seattle to Copenhagen to Marrakech, and from there to the Ivory Coast, all while actually being asleep. There were literally dreams within dreams. I remember the pallid smell of the yellowish sand, the tang of the drying palm fronds, the view of the Atlantic looking south past smaller fishing boats, the delicious fried food of the local cantina on corn 'flat breads.'
All in a place I've never been in reality. Stamps in a passport I can't find, but in my dreams.
(In this case, the rules of the dream change within the dream, mayhaps to account for the disjointed nature of long distances travelled while unconscious, for the most part, and the surreal nature of modern jet service. I've spent so much time jet-lagged that my dream-brain knows there is 'lost time.')
What was I doing with my lost time?
Mmmmm, wish I had a schnitzel right now. Mit mushroom gravy, pomme frites, good stuff. Curry ketchup. (Man-o-man I'm salivating. Is that a whistle I hear?)
Of course not. Let's all just return to sanity here. What were we doing? (I was watching the hummingbird in the back yard, darting from multiple 'hotspots' in the butterfly bush to the holly tree across the alley... He needs 'juice,' I would surmise.)
"Let the good times roll,
Let them knock you a-round.
Let the good times roll,
Let them make you a clown.
Let them leave you up in the air..."
The Cars, "Good Times Roll."
The Wibros were shrinking to points, moving much less, (harder to track, for sure.) My Greys dusted off their Order Blues, though there wasn't much debris or dust on the deck. Merely a reflex to coming out of their near-comas.
Durd'n requested 'trust' and promptly - as soon as I thought 'yes' - transferred something to me, and I have no idea what it was, but (all the sudden) I could hear him, and think in his refined, classical tone. (With a context I couldn't access directly, but I could now reference in tone, inflected language, now-common historical knowledge. He had seen some things.)
A hidden door - to our immediate left - built to blend in with the smooth rock-face, cracked open from the deck and a soft-green light spilled out, and it caught my attention forthwith. Backlit, I could see the shadows of energetic Greys, standing alongside racks of parts on wheeled dollies. I mentally relaxed knowing the Tinglev would be repaired.
"Klargen," my XO pressed. "COMMS reports they are requesting physical access to the ship. All codes seem impeccable."
"Very well, granted, by all means."
They scrambled past us and ran up the ramp of the Tinglev. I felt a spreading calm.
That is that. The Rules of the Dream have no fact or sense outside their construct. I am left to find meaning in the crumbles of memories long past-lived. Answers in the dream only work within the dream.
We're left with Jungian symbols and hope... for another dream.
Is it time to break those rules?
