Dreaming in a Daze

I've written about my wacky dreams before, in all of their vivid and memorable and horrifying glory. My favorite dreams have been those like the one where I was studying with a Hasidic master (that was years ago), and I wish I had more like those. But last night?

The first dream was me (looking like Rihanna of all people), and I was in charge of subbing in a class for a math teacher. The class was learning about basic algebra, and I was trying to get technology involved and the class was very dysfunctional. But the problem? The teacher was actually there in the class the whole time, correcting every little thing I was doing and saying. I couldn't control the class, let alone the lesson. And then, the dream flipped.

I was standing on a street in the Old City or something that looked like it, wearing IDF garb. We were investigating a rumor that a woman on the street was planning to blow herself up on that street. We were questioning several people out on the street (Arabs) and they said they knew nothing, but then this woman walked out, dressed in 1940's style garb, dressed to the nines, and she walked by and just winked at me. I instantly knew that this was the woman who was going to blow herself up. I grabbed the device out of her hand that she would have pushed to detonate and started to move down the street while she just stared at me. She moved near a large group of people (all Arabs, which makes no sense) and she pushed her stomach, like that was where the bomb was, and at the same moment, I pushed the button on the device -- and nothing happened. She started to run and I got her and arrested her. Almost instantly, she turned from being an Arab woman into being a bleach-blond with bright blue eyes and milky skin. I was parading her through town, shouting "She's a Nazi!" I took her through this large hall -- it was almost like a bath house -- full of Jews and everyone was saying "Wow, she's beautiful" and I would spit back, "She's a Nazi!" and everyone responded with disgust. We left the large hall and were heading into the police station and she wrangled herself loose from my grip. I knew I couldn't chase her, so I started to load my gun as she knocked over an IDF soldier and took his garb, got dressed, and ran into one of the IDF gates across the street. I started shooting at her, while yelling that she was a Nazi. I shot her twice, and the rest of the soldiers dragged her into this big room where she ended up being killed. I got really, really upset, curled into a ball, and started weeping about how she should have been put through a trial, prosecuted, and sentenced.

Weird. Okay dream readers -- what's it mean?

Dream a Little Dream ...

Tuvia and I just got home from our motzei Shabbos movie date, in which we saw Inception, that movie with confusing commercials and an even more perplexing premise. And? Well, let's just say it's probably the best movie I've seen in a while, and I highly recommend you all go see it. At 2 hours and 28 minutes, I felt as if I'd been sitting in the crowded theater for a mere hour. I suppose that's part of the trickery related to the movie's theme.

The concept of the movie is that you can "break into" other people's dreams to extract ideas, with the impossibility (or is it?) of inception -- of placing an idea in the dream that will then consume the dreamer's conscious thoughts. There's someone who creates landscapes in dreams, another who masterminds the syrupy goo that keeps you asleep and able to accomplish your dream feat for extended period of time, and so on. It's a dreamscape of pretty much illegal proportions.

So why am I even blogging about this? Well, dreams are something near and dear to my heart, because I dream just about every night, vividly, with the ability (most of the time) to recall the depth and details of my dreams. People, faces, colors, scenescapes, the weather, the conversations, everything. I've also -- and this is the most awesome thing -- mastered the ability to throw myself back into a dream after waking up from it. Sounds nuts, right? Sometimes I wake up from an exceedingly vivid dream, and either unhappy with the point at which it ended or frustrated with how it was going or wanting more details, I push myself back into slumber for the express purpose of satisfying what I want out of the dream. Really radical, eh? I mean, I'm the kind of person who can barely fall asleep on any given night, and yet, when it comes to my dreams, I can push myself back into them to try to change outcomes. For what purpose? No clue. My subconscious and I are probably a psychologist's dream.

The best example of this that I can offer is a dream I had a few months ago in which I somehow ended up in an electrical storm outside of a large university building. I can't remember all the details, but it was a dream in which I walked into the building and accidentally caused a powerchord to hit some water and lit the building up. In the first version of the dream I ran throughout the halls, trying to get people out, but dozens died and the building fell before my eyes. (I'm so irritated; I thought I wrote this dream in my dream journal, but it appears that I did not.) I awoke from the dream, frustrated, angry at myself for something that happened in not-real space. I put myself back down and dreary-eyed attempted to fix the dream. The entire thing played out exactly as before, but I got more people out and was able to call for help. I proceeded to play through this dream about four more times, still unable to help everyone out. I changed the way I went through the building, I altered aspects of the floor plan, I did everything in an effort to re-scape the dream in order to be successful. And yet, still, my subconscious was set on defeating me.

Dreams are ... bizarre. For me, dreams are wicked places that, while supposedly revealing plenty about my innermost thoughts, really just baffles me. Over the past week I had three nights in a row with dreams of being hunted, through city streets, including one city street that featured Kate Gosselin and her sextuplets (she was deeply upset with me for attempting to talk them away from the road while she was busy yelling at someone on the phone). I need to keep a better log of my dreams than I do. I often sit Tuvia down and relate them to him, but he just stares at me blankly like a nutjob. People used to think I was fabricating or elaborating on a kernel of a dream memory. In reality, my dreams are exhausting. I wake up feeling as if I've been running a marathon all night (and in the case of the "being chased" dreams, I really was running -- for my life), and thus I end up feeling as though I haven't slept at all. My mouth guard has become my best friend, with teeth marks poking small holes into its base. Soon enough, I'll chew through the darn thing from dream anxiety.

This stuff is real, folks. And Inception was like this picture of my dreamscape. Weird. Surreal. Creepy. So what I leave you with is a recent dream of mine, from about a week ago, that left Evan staring blankly at me, as usual. Enjoy!

The dream began with Tuvia waking me up for lunch (we're in the Poconos, so the dream took place in our Poconos house, but the house looked a lot nicer and larger than our place actually is). The skies were dark and stormy, and as he was pulling me out of bed this huge torrent of rain came and it started seeping through the ceiling. It was like there was no roof, like the rain was seamlessly slipping through the wooden planks. I started freaking out and told Evan to turn on the lights, and he said, "But it's Shabbat!" and I responded, "I don't care! We need to pack and get the hell out of here!" So he turned on the lights and just then a man came walking up the stairs with an umbrella. "I thought y'all couldn't turn the lights on on Shabbat," he said. We asked him why he was even there and he said he saw our car in the driveway and thought he'd pay a visit. No clue who this guy was, by the way, but I think it might have been the neighbor who I've seen only through his minivan window. We explained the rain, the house falling to pieces, and needing to leave, so he pulled this little ball out of his pocket, pressed a switch, and it lit up. He threw it into the fireplace (which was in a different spot than our actual fireplace) and, with a flash, the rain in the house stopped. He left, and we began to assess the situation. The house suddenly morphed into this big house/community center thing, and all of our friends from West Hartford were there (and some of mine from the shul in Nebraska, too) and the skies were looking seriously doomful. Women and kids started to scream and sirens started going off ... so I ran for the lower level, I crouched in a corner, only to realize that the entire room -- of the basement, which was done up like a kindergarten or preschool classroom -- was full of windows, and this big, looming tornado was coming at us. I got up, squished this little kids hand as I stepped on it (oops), and ran for the only room in the place without any windows, a big cement block of a room. As I got there, an old woman grabbed my hand with a grip I can't describe. I tried to push her off, and I think I broke her arm in the process. I finally got to the corner of the room and then ... POOF. There was a flash and I looked up and I was sitting on a cement floor, the walls mostly decimated, in a field of pumpkins. Alone.

Dreaming of Calmer Nights.

Sometimes I wonder if my wiring is off. I've blogged about my vivid dreams before, these narratives that roll around in my head at night, waking me up sometimes in a sweat, other times in tears or a cry, a yelp. Sometimes the vivid nature of my dreams is awesome, it's like a movie reel spinning rapidly. But recently, my dreams have been haunting and horrifying. It makes me wonder what's wrong; is my subconscious trying to tell me something?

Last week I had a few horrifying dreams. One I won't share the details of, but let's just say it involved death and my parents. The other dream was weird in that it was repetitive, as in Groundhog Day (the movie) style. The dream played out once, with horrifying results. So my mind replayed the dream over and over, trying to fix the situation, trying to lessen the damage and the casualties. But when I woke up, it was still death and damages. You see, the dream involved me walking into a big stone building on some college campus, and in the hallway I spotted this gigantic electrical cable sitting in a pile of water in the hallway. It was sparking a little, but I assumed someone was taking care of it. So I walked down the hallway, in my socks, and there was a spark. Suddenly, a fire broke out and I took off running, flames flying down the hallway, ready to consume me. I yelled for people to get out, I ran into classrooms, I screamed, and people ignored me. The dream ended -- the first time around -- with me outside, watching the building burn and people running out all ablaze. As the dream went on, I handled the logistics better, got more people out, but there were still casualties. When I woke up, I felt defeated. After five re-tries, I still couldn't save everyone.

This week, as in last night, I woke up almost crying. Tuvia had to wake me up, actually, because I was breathing funny and started to yelp out cries. I was in China, driving down a road, looking for something with Evan and someone else, and I finally found it. I dove out of the car, and ran into this building, and there was a gigantic pool-like space with milky green and yellow water, bodies just floating in it. There were women there giving birth into the water, willing their children to die rather than be born into China and a downtrodden life. I tried to stop them, made women go in the water to rescue the babies, but women were also diving in, drowning. I was frantic, trying to save them. Again, I couldn't save them; they wouldn't listen.

Any dream interpreters out there? It's probably stress, but I get an overwhelming sense of helplessness with these dreams. But let's just say, I'm tired of having such rotten, depressing, vivid dreams, because the horrific images stay with me, appearing at the most random times -- like when I'm driving down the highway.

Here's to more restful nights, less vivid dreams, or at least the kind that don't have me feeling miswired.