So I have elected not to sleep
Because who needs sleep? Does this count as insomnia? I am electing not to sleep because I am sleeping poorly. Does it matter if it counts as insomnia?
Last night in one of my dreams (not a bad one, just a weird one), I was going to Norway. (Why? I’ve never been to Norway.) I went to the airport (I have a dream-airport which appears regularly, along with a dream-European-city, dream-river, etc: the layout is always much the same, etc, though it stands for different places). Anyhow. I went to the airport at about 9.30 and was told there were no more flights to Norway that night, so I had to come back for an 8.30 flight the next day, and to be there at 5.30.
I can’t remember if I was late or not, though I recall being worried about it. I was heading to the gate — my dream-airport has no security to go through! — and the elevator was down, but I was only walking down (from floor 19 to floor 2), so I just walked. But then I had lost my boarding pass, so I had to go back. I found a secret elevator, only it didn’t work right, so I had to lie down, sort of, on the back of the car, which was padded in red with white. It tilted as it went up — quickly! — so I was lying on the floor.
I woke up before the elevator reached the 19th floor, and I do not know what would have happened next. Would I have made it to Norway? Would it have looked exactly like Paris, London and Zurich? Would the airplane have been mauve?
August 31st, 2005 at 2:02 am
I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of recurring dreams (or recurring dream imagery) but not sure that I’ve ever had them. When I was really young I dreamt that I was falling multiple times, but each time I woke up on the floor, so I figured there was no deeper explanation. (I used to toss and turn a lot; I finally cured the problem by placing a chair at the edge of the bed which meant I’d touch it and wake up before falling.)
For a short while when I was a teenager I had - or, during my waking moments I convinced myself that I had - a number of dreams set in the same sort of landscape. I never identified it as any particular existing place, but sort of a combination of mountains, city, and river that may or may not correspond to some actual location. But now I wonder if it was just one dream that happened to be so unusually vivid that I became convinced that the only way I could remember its images so clearly was by dreaming them more than once.
August 31st, 2005 at 12:59 pm
I’ve had recurring dreams, though only one anymore. But the recurring imagery is quite different. I can tell that my city is in fact supposed to be London or Paris or whatever — but it always looks the same, and actually sort of like Amsterdam (nothing like London, despite having been there, my dreams of it are of this half-real city). I am sure they mean something, or stand for something — this is often the only interesting thing in my dreams, this weird set that I have, as if my unconscious could not afford to build more than a few.
I used to dream of drowning and suffocating, but it turns out it was because my 30lb cat slept on my chest.
August 31st, 2005 at 1:13 pm
I have a dream-house with a particularly intricate dream-attic full of wacky crawl space (for nightmares), though I haven’t dreamt anything in it lately.
August 31st, 2005 at 11:29 pm
That’s very handy, I suppose. Does the layout move around too so you can get trapped? That happened in my dream-university.