Reawaken my dream life

I dreamt last night that I was rafting swiftly down a lava flow. It was very exciting, and I was exhilirated by the whole thing.

Today, as I keep thinking of the dream and wishing I could remember more of it, I’ve got the feeling it was a recurring dream. I may have to flip through my dream journal to see if I recorded a similar dream.

I dreamt that I was on a shoreline, which I think symbolizes the meeting between the conscious and unconscious mind. I am about to admit something big to myself, I think.

Dream analysis is so great, because it’s like writing your own perfect fortune cookie fortunes – depending on the dream, I guess.

So, I’m in a darkened movie theater. I’ve taken a weekend job, cleaning the ceiling of all the theaters at a local cinema. My job is to squeegee the ceiling as unobtrusively as possible, so as not to disturb the film viewers, but it’s not easy. I drip windexey water on them, and they boo and hiss at me.

So, in this one, Brad Pitt and I were manning a big spaceship when we got the call that our project had been cancelled and we were to return to earth. We were all pretty disappointed, but after a moment of letting the bad news sink in, I manned up and started cleaning up the mess we’d made, taking out the trash and things like that. Later, I was in a cafeteria and I saw my old friend sitting at a table, eating. He pulled his collar up over his mouth and just stared at me like he wanted me to pass on by. His new phone was out and I looked at it, realizing that he probably had not entered my phone number into the phonebook when he got it. If he talked with me, eventually he’d have to ask for my phone number, and he didn’t want that to happen, so he waited for me to get the idea that I should go. I walked a dozen tables over and sat by myself to eat, staring out the window.

I have had a stream of dreams over the past week that I’ve written down and mulled over. Some of them have helped to understand how I’m feeling about life situations that were leaving me fuddled, and some of them are baking my noodle over what they might mean.

I read Carl Jung’s Psychology and Religion this week, and while parts at the end got a little wooey for me, I have to appreciate what he’s done for popular thinking, given that he delivered those lectures at Yale in 1937, about how taking your dreams seriously can help you live a better life, essentially. Maybe not everyone thinks that now, but more certainly do over the influence of just this one man.

Last night’s dream? A guy who liked me years ago and I ran away from is cutting my hair – lovingly, carefully, and I enjoy the experience, only when I walk away, I have an awful punked out cut with bald spots and weird ponytails and such. People laugh at me. Then I go to a baseball stadium and see a fly ball land at the foot of a woman sleeping in a lawn chair. She never wakes up, and the ball just rolls away. Then I am standing on the balcony facing concessions, and there’s a table full of people we know sitting there. I take the guy’s hands (he’s there again) and ask him if he was really that hurt that I rejected him, and with tears in his eyes, he shakes his head yes.

And then I kicked in my sleep, my cat clawed my toe so I wouldn’t knock him off the bed, and that hurt, so I woke up. Guess I’ll just have to wonder what happened next!

I dreamt that a tapeworm was crawling out of my eyebrow! It was so scary and gross, and I had to keep my eye squeezed shut while it worked itself out. It happened three times, and when it was all over, I stood over a utility sink and sobbed.

My first take on the dream dictionary interpretation was alarming, because it says tapeworms forwarn of “poor health and little pleasure” or something like that. There were three of them, and I’ve got a trinity of people with health problems in my life, so maybe my bottling up of emotion about their health issues is what’s causing me all the grief. I guess I’m just alarmed that this could mean MY health is the issue.

What an awful dream!

I dreamt this afternoon that I was trying to take my truck up a roadway that was nearly vertical, and though I never did experience the feeling of falling, I did have my doubts about whether it would work for me.

I think it means that, in spite of my great intentions to explore life in my new area, I am probably expecting too much of myself, my time, my funds, my energy, and I just won’t be able to keep this up.

Some of this may be more directly related to my running goals. It could be that I will have to reduce my expectations for a little while and be content with maintaining my current mileages while my body rebuilds itself while performing at this higher level of activity.

I was on an elevated walkway with handrails, like the one Luke runs on while he’s fighting Darth Vader in the cloud city, and a machine comes along, grabs my section of it, carries it through the sky, and plunks it down in a new spot.

This time, the walkway goes alongside a shoreline, only it’s partly submerged in murky, brown water. I appeal to an authority figure over this; “Can’t it be raised some more?” I ask him, but he shakes his head no.

Interpretation: I am on a path that will continue in spite of my move. I am flooded with old, stale, negative emotions, and that is the background for my search for gainful employment, a search which is affecting other changes in me that help keep me from sinking completely and could help elevate me above this current waist-level. I need to clean up the water, too.

So, I’ve been traveling and camping out and packing and doing a lot of driving, and during this time, I have not had my dream journal with me. I do remember a few things from some different dreams, though:

-in one dream, I accepted responsibility for a pair of twins who were ages 8 and 9, but when I got them, they were just babies. This one doesn’t have clear meaning for me.

-in another dream, I was hammering in a tent stake to put up my tent, only I looked at it again and saw it was a big sword that I was hammering into the ground next to my bed (which was, get this, in a stream bed – cute, no?). This means to me that I am allowing my ambition to sleep but it will be waiting for me when I am ready.

-in my dream from last night or the night before, I walked out of a restaurant which, in reality, burned to the ground many years ago, and it was night. There was a big group of us, and we had been called outside to see a spectacle; we all gasped and oohed and aahed as we saw the immensity of the starry night sky, for it had grown so much larger. This means to me that I am ready for a spiritual journey or awakening.

Now, I’m reunited with my dream journal, so I should be able to record my dreams again. Luckily, I remember these little tidbits and can jot them down, too.

I was able to write down the dreams I had last night, because when I woke up, I refused to open my eyes and put a big pillow over my head and thought of nothing but what I could remember. Gradually, most of the dream came back to me, and I was able to write it down. My handwriting is really bad in the morning.

I didn’t get all of what the dream was trying to tell me, and I’m a bit concerned, because this is the second time in a few weeks that I’ve dreamed of a male figure who was insane – the dream dictionary I use says it’s a sign that you aren’t confident in an endeavor turning out well with something related to my masculine side, that I may be afraid of the consequences of my asserting myself – at least, that’s my interpretation.

Another part was interesting; I was driving through a neighborhood on a pleasant boulevard, and snow began to fall, softy, gently, all around. It was beautiful. I loved it, but I also shook my head and put my car in reverse, going back the way I came. Not time for tranquility yet, I guess.