I've been having a lot of very strange, powerful dreams lately.
This afternoon, during an attempt at a nap, I had one that really overwhelmed me.
I was waiting at an intersection, somewhere, to cross the street, and I noticed that there were a lot of women with baby strollers there, waiting as well. In real life, this would probably have annoyed me but in the dream I squatted down to interact with the kids. Often in my weirder dreams there is an element of meta-awareness, not that I am conscious I am dreaming, but that I am simultaneously viewing and living a script that has already been written, like I am walking through a movie that I've already seen. So at this point in the dream, that awareness kicked in and I knew what going to happen. There was deep vibration that only the kids and I were aware of, and I knew, from my meta-state, that it was something evil and powerful on a level that should have had us all petrified. The children were scared but I was almost more curious, like the first few seconds of the first earthquake one ever experiences, before the abject fear sets in. The images on one of the kids' coloring books began changing and that was when I began to become afraid, though all I expected to happen next was that the children's eyes would start to change, to turn white, and the adults would notice and start screaming and it would be over. But that isn't what happened, because my meta-knowledge in dreams is actually always wrong. A figure appeared out of nowhere and snatched one of the children and began running, and I don't remember thinking that I should pursue, but I did. Then there was a moment of unusual meta, in which this was actually a movie, and one unseen person said to another that the next reel was missing, and they had a backup but it was unprocessed, and told the other person that he should run it through some campy "old movie" filters, like artificial scratching and desaturation, and I said, while watching myself running towards the dark figure with the stolen infant, that no, despite the fact that this is an old movie, it's held up really well so don't do that. And then I was just running, and I looked back and saw others running as well, but I'd lost sight of the kidnapper, and I was losing hope, running into an unfamiliar park. Then quite suddenly, my brother appeared, holding the baby, triumphant, as if he'd intercepted the bad guy, but it did occur to me to wonder, perhaps he had been the bad guy in the first place? I only wondered for a second and took the baby, warm, into my arms, and turned to return him to his mother. She was not far behind me, a beautiful young woman, and I didn't notice that it might be odd that she didn't seem out of breath from all the sprinting she must have been doing to catch up with me, instead focusing on the naked despair on her face, watching it transform through stages of disbelief and joy, as I handed her her child, as I handed her a miracle. My own arms suddenly empty, I began to cry, and all the other players vanished, and it was just me, crying quite hysterically. There was a final meta-moment in which I thought, "It's difficult for me to cry like this --"
And I woke up. Really crying. My eyes were not open but I was struck by the sound of it, the sound of me crying. It's the second time in recent weeks that this has happened, that crying in a dream has woken me up, but the other dream was much more obvious in why it would have reduced me to tears. This one, not so obvious. Is it because of what I did, or what I didn't do, what I have done, or what I have not yet done? The question remains.
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