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Day 15 – Your dreams, in great detail
There's a city. I don't know if it's the same one or different each time, but I always know I've been there before, sometimes only a few minutes ago. There are stone walls, and underpasses, and dark skyscrapers, and graffiti, and rain, but no maps.
There's a building. It's usually built around the plan of my old high school (three interlocking buildings, one of which contains a complete loop, with staircases all at cross purposes) but is frequently weirder on the inside. Sometimes it actually is a school, staging those 'oh my god, I'm late for class and three months behind on my homework' anxiety dreams. (But rarely naked - three months behind on homework was usually anxiety enough.) Although I've found that recently if one of those does crop up, dreaming me stands up, declares 'Sod this, I've got a degree and a good job', and walks out. So they've mostly given in. But the building - or at least the ground-plan - remains: as a headquarters, as a museum, as a grand ballroom, as a liner, as a spaceship, as a cavern, as a prison, as a temple, as a home of the future, as a starting place for somewhere else.
There are high places. Cold and empty. Sometimes storms, and sometimes starlight. Not really anywhere, more somewhere else.
There is usually at least one person I know from real life, even if it's from an old real life, long ago. (Kris hates it when he appears in my dreams, because of the times he does something hateful and hurtful there, and I spend half the next day pissed off with him, and feeling semi-justified in doing so. He also objects to the times he has fun in my dreams, because he feels cheated that he misses out on it.) But usually it's just a few familiar faces appearing alongside a vast cast of people created purely for that moment, complete with faces and bodies and voices and personalities and histories and selves, and not necessarily human. I don't know if they reappear from one dream to the next, but if they do I don't recognise them, and they don't recognise me.
There are dreams that someone other than me wakes up from, and they sit there in the dark, looking at an unfamiliar room through my eyes, looking at my life like an actor unsure if they want to carry on with this role or just break the contract and skip town. I can remember those thoughts they think, but never the dreams they wake out of. I'm not entirely surprised at that. I'm not sure they're mine to remember.
Dreams eat the world outside, digesting the train journeys and club music and half finished films that play on, outside in the waking world. They're particularly fond of alarm clocks, which they can devour three at a time. I've lost count of the number of times I've been on a secret mission to stop the wailing sirens before they bring the enemy upon us, or wake the beast, or set the walls tumbling down.
Some dreams protect themselves in other ways. One dream in which I was perfectly aware that I was dreaming, and everyone around me was aware that they were a figment... and they were all begging/threatening/cajoling me to stay asleep, because being dreams, to wake up would be to kill them all. I tried to save them until I realised it was a trap. Strangely, it never felt like a nightmare.
True nightmares never let on that they're dreams. The worst ones slip through levels of waking and sleeping, so that each escape into wakefulness slides into a fresh horror, until awake can no longer be trusted. Even in daylight, the world isn't quite trustworthy, and anything could come slipping in through the edges. The worst ones can linger for days. The very worst one still haunts me 15 years later.
There are also the wearying dreams, which are far less terrible, but far more insidious. Dreams which involve running a series of thankless tasks, on a neverending treadmill of mundane, that make a soft night's sleep feel like a hard day's work, and are twice as exhausting as staying awake. (I was getting a lot of those a couple of months back.)
There are also visually overworked dreams that depart from the usual cinematic illusion into whatever screen I've been staring at during the day: design dreams, where one action advances into the next through layered inDesign frames; illustrator dreams, where every action has to be drawn in rather than taken; writing dreams, where words are the object rather than the symbol.
(Can you read and write in dreams? I seem to remember hearing once that you can't. But if that's true, you can certainly dream that you can read and write well enough to fool yourself.)
There are creative dreams that hold together on waking. I once dreamt a full-length Disney-style cartoon musical (complete with a chirpy main character on a voyage of self discovery, a comedy subplot, and a full chorus of operatic snowmen). Somewhere I still have the plot notes, and the sketches. I also once dreamt i was the author of the most incredible stage-play, which played to sold-out houses and mass acclaim, and won many critical awards. Someone in my dream then pointed out to me that it was such a shame that in real life, this play had already been written by one of the greatest playwrights of all time. So I forgot the script upon waking, only to realise that no such playwright had ever such existed, and the play - that genuinely had been mine - had been lost forever.
And there are erotic dreams, that usually get condensed down upon waking into one striking detail (a glance, a word, a scar, a meeting on the stairs) which I can later work up into a full-length story (in all its unashamed Mary Sue glory, for my mind only) for use whenever I please.
But most dreams are feature-film dreams: heroic and drama-filled; chasing and running from; fighting off enemies, rescuing allies, hunting down lost treasures; missions and puzzles; glory and vengeance; dreadful doom and ultimate rewards; sudden twists and dramatic reveals; and always, always full of gaping plotholes that don't matter at all. Dream logic is far stretchier and stickier than Hollywood logic, ensnaring disbelief in a web of self-empathy, because nobody knows how to fool you better than you. I can usually remember a portion of any dream upon waking, but the rest always slips away like fairy gold in sunlight.
Topic list is here
There's a city. I don't know if it's the same one or different each time, but I always know I've been there before, sometimes only a few minutes ago. There are stone walls, and underpasses, and dark skyscrapers, and graffiti, and rain, but no maps.
There's a building. It's usually built around the plan of my old high school (three interlocking buildings, one of which contains a complete loop, with staircases all at cross purposes) but is frequently weirder on the inside. Sometimes it actually is a school, staging those 'oh my god, I'm late for class and three months behind on my homework' anxiety dreams. (But rarely naked - three months behind on homework was usually anxiety enough.) Although I've found that recently if one of those does crop up, dreaming me stands up, declares 'Sod this, I've got a degree and a good job', and walks out. So they've mostly given in. But the building - or at least the ground-plan - remains: as a headquarters, as a museum, as a grand ballroom, as a liner, as a spaceship, as a cavern, as a prison, as a temple, as a home of the future, as a starting place for somewhere else.
There are high places. Cold and empty. Sometimes storms, and sometimes starlight. Not really anywhere, more somewhere else.
There is usually at least one person I know from real life, even if it's from an old real life, long ago. (Kris hates it when he appears in my dreams, because of the times he does something hateful and hurtful there, and I spend half the next day pissed off with him, and feeling semi-justified in doing so. He also objects to the times he has fun in my dreams, because he feels cheated that he misses out on it.) But usually it's just a few familiar faces appearing alongside a vast cast of people created purely for that moment, complete with faces and bodies and voices and personalities and histories and selves, and not necessarily human. I don't know if they reappear from one dream to the next, but if they do I don't recognise them, and they don't recognise me.
There are dreams that someone other than me wakes up from, and they sit there in the dark, looking at an unfamiliar room through my eyes, looking at my life like an actor unsure if they want to carry on with this role or just break the contract and skip town. I can remember those thoughts they think, but never the dreams they wake out of. I'm not entirely surprised at that. I'm not sure they're mine to remember.
Dreams eat the world outside, digesting the train journeys and club music and half finished films that play on, outside in the waking world. They're particularly fond of alarm clocks, which they can devour three at a time. I've lost count of the number of times I've been on a secret mission to stop the wailing sirens before they bring the enemy upon us, or wake the beast, or set the walls tumbling down.
Some dreams protect themselves in other ways. One dream in which I was perfectly aware that I was dreaming, and everyone around me was aware that they were a figment... and they were all begging/threatening/cajoling me to stay asleep, because being dreams, to wake up would be to kill them all. I tried to save them until I realised it was a trap. Strangely, it never felt like a nightmare.
True nightmares never let on that they're dreams. The worst ones slip through levels of waking and sleeping, so that each escape into wakefulness slides into a fresh horror, until awake can no longer be trusted. Even in daylight, the world isn't quite trustworthy, and anything could come slipping in through the edges. The worst ones can linger for days. The very worst one still haunts me 15 years later.
There are also the wearying dreams, which are far less terrible, but far more insidious. Dreams which involve running a series of thankless tasks, on a neverending treadmill of mundane, that make a soft night's sleep feel like a hard day's work, and are twice as exhausting as staying awake. (I was getting a lot of those a couple of months back.)
There are also visually overworked dreams that depart from the usual cinematic illusion into whatever screen I've been staring at during the day: design dreams, where one action advances into the next through layered inDesign frames; illustrator dreams, where every action has to be drawn in rather than taken; writing dreams, where words are the object rather than the symbol.
(Can you read and write in dreams? I seem to remember hearing once that you can't. But if that's true, you can certainly dream that you can read and write well enough to fool yourself.)
There are creative dreams that hold together on waking. I once dreamt a full-length Disney-style cartoon musical (complete with a chirpy main character on a voyage of self discovery, a comedy subplot, and a full chorus of operatic snowmen). Somewhere I still have the plot notes, and the sketches. I also once dreamt i was the author of the most incredible stage-play, which played to sold-out houses and mass acclaim, and won many critical awards. Someone in my dream then pointed out to me that it was such a shame that in real life, this play had already been written by one of the greatest playwrights of all time. So I forgot the script upon waking, only to realise that no such playwright had ever such existed, and the play - that genuinely had been mine - had been lost forever.
And there are erotic dreams, that usually get condensed down upon waking into one striking detail (a glance, a word, a scar, a meeting on the stairs) which I can later work up into a full-length story (in all its unashamed Mary Sue glory, for my mind only) for use whenever I please.
But most dreams are feature-film dreams: heroic and drama-filled; chasing and running from; fighting off enemies, rescuing allies, hunting down lost treasures; missions and puzzles; glory and vengeance; dreadful doom and ultimate rewards; sudden twists and dramatic reveals; and always, always full of gaping plotholes that don't matter at all. Dream logic is far stretchier and stickier than Hollywood logic, ensnaring disbelief in a web of self-empathy, because nobody knows how to fool you better than you. I can usually remember a portion of any dream upon waking, but the rest always slips away like fairy gold in sunlight.
Topic list is here
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