ReDreaming: Reliving the Stories of the Night

While looking through my computer files today trying to find an old photo, I came across a folder entitled “dreams.” Since I didn’t remember creating it, I opened it to see what it was. Did it contain dreams such as what I had wanted for the future or dreams like stories imagined in my sleep?

It contained the later. Inside I found where I had typed one of my dreams after waking up in the middle of the night. It had obviously been typed hurriedly (there were many grammar and spelling typos because I wanted to get it all down before I forgot), and it would never be considered great literature, but I really enjoyed reading it.

At first I couldn’t remember anything about the dream as I read it, but then parts of it started to come back to me. It was like I was reliving a strange, crazy and disjointed part of my past. Looking back on it, I remember how real everything had felt. I had even written about what I was thinking while the story played out in my mind. Everything had seemed so logical as it unfolded while I slept, but reading it this afternoon, I had to laugh at the choices I made and things I did.

Since then, I’ve found other dreams that I’ve written down. Each one I read brought back great, yet strange, memories of crazy lives I’ve lived in my sleep. In several of them, I wandered over the green (nonexistent) hills around the (nonexistent) Greek ruins in the woods on our land in Tennessee. In others, I’m running through those woods, over the creek and into a small (nonexistent) cabin/shed. I’m being chased by someone for some reason. I have to escape, though strangely, I’m not afraid. (This one could be due to the stories of seeing a strange man in the woods that my older cousin used to try to frighten us with. Shame on you Emily.) In others, I’m flying thorough the sky in the backyard, or front yard, of the house I grew up in. The feeling of soaring in the air with the wind blowing through my hair is just as exhilarating now looking back on it as it was when I lived it out in my dream.

For those of you who remember your dreams, I strongly recommend that you write them down as soon as you wake up, whether it’s in the morning or in the middle of the night. Let’s face it, no matter how excited you are about a fascinating dream you just had, most other people won’t feel the same way when you try to explain it to them. But if you write it down and then look back at it weeks, months or even years later, you will be able to experience that excitement again, and with you as your audience you can’t fail to thrill and delight.

I’ve posted an excerpt from one of my dreams below. (Remember, my focus was on speed rather than eloquence.)

I was in a strange room. Wanting to leave, I opened a thin door and tried to fit my head through it, but the door was too narrow for me to fit. While I was trying, a little girl came in the room and asked me if I had tried blowing on the couch yet. I said “no” and asked what she was talking about. She went over to the couch and stood on the left side of it away from the entrance into the other room. She stood facing the bottom of the couch. (It was either a tall couch and/or she was very short.) Looking at it closely, she blew on it, then explained as she acted out her words, “you step back 3 steps, wait 3 seconds and step to the side.” As she stepped to the side, she slowly sunk into the floor, like it was quicksand, and disappeared. The first time I tried it, I kept falling over. When I tried to step back, the floor was wavy, and I couldn’t keep my balance. The second time, I just fell over and landed on my rear in the place where I was supposed to have stood (3 steps back). I waited for 3 seconds and then scooted over to the spot to the side. The floor was hard when I sat on it, but then it gradually grew soft, and I sunk down into it. I wasn’t scared. I could feel myself falling, and thought “this feels cool, and it’s fun. This is like Alice and the rabbit hole.”...Just a few seconds later, I landed in the same room I had been in, and through the entrance way, I could see a party going on in the other room. I had gone back in time to the time that the museum I was in represented…

(You’ll have to see me for a complete version.)  J