Dabbling into Dreaming

I was thinking in the shower again this morning reviewing some of the nebulous dreams of the previous night and early morning hours. I remember quite a few of my dreams and there are periods when I seem to exert a great deal of energy into dreaming as I will awake exhausted. I wish (like many) I knew what exactly the function of dreaming is...sometimes they are ordinary dreams, others are twisted everyday life and then there are the outright outlandish and fantastical dreams.

My dreaming usually involves many, many strangers with a few people from real life sprinkled in. Sometimes the strangers have reoccurring roles, sometimes not. Sometimes people from real life are themselves as I know them and sometimes not. There seems to be no real rules or boundaries or logic in dreaming. Ghost-possessed dogs are just as acceptable as having friends laugh at you as walk through school only in a short t-shirt that you have your hands tugging down. I rarely remember names or numbers from dreams even when they are significant, so if I do remember I wonder what they mean. Schafer was a name that remained with me this morning, as did some of the images, plot and emotions from the dreams I could recall. Retelling dreams is nearly always a frustrating and baffling effort because dreams aren't like real life that can be encapsulated into the logic of words. Dreaming often involves cues known only to the dreamer. Still, I am going to try (mayhap futilely) to share at least some of what transpired in my dreams last night.

I can tell you one dream began fairly inanely enough. I was searching with my sister for a rug for the studio (which we really are doing) and we went into a store which I believe I have been to before whilst dreaming (the clerk was certainly someone I had dreamt of before and she remembered me and asked me to say hello to two people) where we found a wonderful rug with an orange background and pink, yellow, green and turquoise accents marked down from a large price to under $20. Even in dreams I should have known this was too good to be true. So, we ended up purchasing the rug only to be told that we would have to go to the warehouse to pick up the rug. As we had no idea where the warehouse was a man (who I assumed worked for the store) offered to take me. I became separated from my sister at this point. We drove to the warehouse, which did not look anything like a warehouse, and he went inside with me following. This is when the dream changed...inside the so-called warehouse was dozens of people, very eerily placid and slack-mouth people. I find out the warehouse housed the town's zombies too and they didn't remain docile for long and I found myself running with another normal person (some guy who appeared I guess) and we hid behind boxes, etc. in a room chose at random. Luckily this guy also knew how to find outlets to other rooms through boxes. We climbed in boxes only to appear in another room, finding the rug on the way (I think) and somehow we made it out of the warehouse of horror (that part I don't really recall but it involved some plan). I have skipped some of the more gruesome aspects of the dream that I can vaguely picture. Strangely, enough I don't classify this dream as a nightmare as I have had too many dreams like this one and I realize whilst dreaming it is only a dream....

Another dream though bothers me because of the emotions involved and because I became confused as I began to buy into the dream. In this dream I was talking to a girl when I told her something about myself I suddenly remembered: I was married and divorced at a very young age. My dream self thought wow, I should really include that in my 100 Things (a list I really did do this past week) because it is a really interesting tidbit about my life. In conjunction with this memory of a failed marriage at a VERY young age is also the revelation to me that I had lost a baby (the impetus for such a marriage). Now, I know this didn't really happen, but I have dreamt about this early marriage in a previous dream and every time I think of this hidden past it triggers an emotional amalgamation that is incredibly real: I feel claustrophobic, trapped, confused, pressured, ashamed, afraid, out of control, etc. It is the emotion profile that disturbs me because I have felt it before in real life and yet I can't figure out where or when.

There are two other dreams I remember from this past night/morning concerning a couple of college friends, but they make even less sense than the dreams above...they are more like vignettes that seem to have no real purpose. One involved my friend in Texas, a bedspread from my childhood I lent her in my dream and her passing me her hairbrush that I then cleaned out. I thought about how dark her hair was as I threw it away. The other dream involved my friend in Ohio in which she said how much she hated eating alone (we each were in a station with a computer which reminds me of when I vote, but this time you had to fill in family & personal information rather than which candidate you wished to vote for and we ate at the individual stations) as she was too social and she didn’t like the chorizo that they served. She said next time we eat together (I had the impression that this was some sort of reunion—there were other details in this dream, but they are about the journey from the computers to another place in which my friend disclosed her opinions and they involve a hill, sweeping vistas, and how berries or flowers were planted there—blue on one side of the trail and red on the other).

I wonder what the heck it all means? If you, dear reader, have an idea (and I haven't completely confused you) please let me know or if you just want to share some of your dreams or dream theory, I would love to hear about any of it....