I’ve mostly “graduated” from college anxiety (haven’t attended the courses, don’t know in which rooms they’re being held, still attending decades after graduation with no job prospects) to radio station panic (no music to play, only garbage on the teletype with nothing to read on the news report upcoming in two minutes) to pathology dreams (loads of cases with stacks of slide folders to work through and massive numbers of cytologies to screen).
Seconds may pass while awakening during which I gradually realize that the threats are non-existent.
I’ve also had neglected fish tank dreams and ones in which the car I was driving got away from me and is careening unoccupied down the street, about to wreak mayhem.
Original nightmares are few and far between and even then are generally unsatisfying. In one, I realized I was dreaming and told a woman sitting across the lunch table from me that she wasn’t real. She just made a face at me.
I used to get pianist nightmares. The dreams where you are standing backstage and the audience has all your family, friends, peers, etc., and the emcee announces, “Now, Velocity is about to perform Tchaikovsky’s No. 26 Scherzo in D major” and I’m protesting, “What the FUCK is that!??”
I’d rather have Oscar Levant’s fantasy in “An American in Paris”, where he’s not only brilliantly performing Gershwin’s Concerto in F on the piano, he’s simultaneously conducting the orchestra, is the entire violin section, also doing percussion, and at the end, is a concertgoer wildly applauding his own performance.
I used to play trombone in high school so I do have band dreams. Usually I’ve been given some instrument I don’t know how to play, like a flute. Or I have a trombone but it’s not making any sound.
I have stress dreams almost every night. I’m thinking it’s a side effect of one or more of the meds I take. It’s usually the type of dream where I’m in a strange part of a city and can’t figure out how to get to. . .wherever. I don’t know the train/bus/transit system and at times it gets frantic. Last night I woke up from a weird dream in which someone had hung their laundry on a power line using electrical tape.
I don’t always remember my dreams vividly, but sometimes I do, especially when the details are as unusual as this.
I was in a used/rare bookstore, such as I like to frequent. The worker pointed out a novel from the 1930s that was a spinoff of the comic strip The Phantom (you know…The Ghost Who Walks). Many comic strip/radio/movie serial characters did, indeed, have such spinoff novels.
Mostly, I know The Phantom from the 1996 movie that I saw in the theater and rather enjoyed. This was the era of dark, broody Batman clones, so it was a breath of fresh air to have a superhero who actually smiled and seemed to enjoy what he was doing. And I also like the fact that the Phantom and other Lee Falk comic heroes, like Mandrake, are allowed to balance marriage and family life with their heroics.
Anyway, in this dream, the bookstore worker told me that this novel caused a stir in the 1930s when it was published…it depicted The Phantom, Kit Walker, and his fiancee, Diana Palmer, doing the deed before they were married.
I leafed through the book. I think the context of the oh-so-scandalous scene was the fact that the couple was on the eve of facing a dangerous enemy with no guarantee they’d both survive it, so they decided if they didn’t live to see their wedding, they would at least have their wedding night. The act of love itself was mainly described through delicate euphemism…rather lovely and evocative for a 1930s pulp novel, and not graphic at all.
And my dream-self thought, “Geez…if THIS was enough to scandalize readers in the thirties, Fifty Shades of Grey would have killed them stone cold dead!”
Last night, I dreamed I was offered admission to West Point despite never having applied to West Point. I was torn - “I don’t think the Army life is for me, but…West Point is a really good school, you know…and are they sure they really want a 37 year old cadet?”
I once dreamed that I performed the entirety of Van Morrison’s “Caravan” on stage. I’m certainly capable of learning to sing it and play it on guitar, and could probably fake my way through playing it. No way I’d remember the lyrics, though. I’ve had other dreams where I was more musically gifted than I actually am, although I’m no slouch in real life.
I had a weird one last night. I was co-owner of a night club, and met up with an old flame, an Indian woman who was now a police officer. We both decided that we weren’t sure what we wanted to do with our lives, but whatever it was, we wanted to do it together.
It was a very pleasant dream… but I have no idea where any of that came from. I don’t even hang out in night clubs, and I’ve never owned or run a business (I’m a teacher). I’ve never dated any Indian women, and I think I’d be unlikely to date a cop.
Yeah, weird. Ain’t it funny what we sometimes dream of?
I dreamt of a childhood friend from 3rd grade, Brian S who was a casual friend and not a very close friend, at that. That was some 55 years ago and 3,000 miles away from where I live now! I hadn’t thought of Brian in over 50 years. More specifically it was about when I went to Brian’s house to play, and I met his father that day. In my dream was Brian S and his father, Mr. S. That was the one and only time I ever met Mr. S, and yet there he was in my dream.
The depths of the human brain is a mysterious thing.
I’ve gone through a lot of weird sleep phases in my life. I say phases because they pass and don’t usually come back.
When I was in high school I went through a phase of probably a few months where every day was deja vu from a dream I had the night before.
Mundane shit like hotdogs for lunch at school.
“I dreamed this last night.”
Every day.
Brains are weird.
I also went through a lucid dreaming phase, a sleep paralysis phase, with hypnopompic hallucinations, and a phase where I woke up screaming and hitting things. All passed. I do still occasionally have auditory hallucinations which is not great when you already have a fear of home invasion. It’s usually a loud crash or a voice. Then I have to spend the next 30 minutes talking myself into going asleep again. But that’s only once every few months or so.
My house-related stress dream lately has been being in our old house that we sold a year and a half ago, with, for some reason, a whole bunch of other people, and then realizing that we’re not supposed to be there because it’s not our house any more. As I’m running around trying to get everyone to understand that we have to leave, the new owner inevitably shows up.
Like most of my house dreams, it’s also never the right house. Usually it’s a random imaginary house, although it was once my childhood house.
I had a dream a couple nights ago where I was hanging out with two of my friends. I passed a mirror and looked at it and the person in it was not me. It was a woman with short dark hair. Of course, nothing seemed amiss in the dream and I didn’t realize it wasn’t me until I woke up and remembered it.
I’ve dreamed about being other people before. Last year I dreamed that I was a Chinese woman. I was having a conversation with my Chinese family and me, the dreamer, didn’t understand what we were saying because we were speaking Chinese. I just understood the emotional gist of what was going on. It was kind of like watching it from the outside. Very weird.
