By and large, anyway. It all goes back to my childhood. For as long as I remember, I've never been able to be harmed in a dream. I remember one dream from back before I was in school: I was playing in a large indoor maze with other kids, running around playing some sort of tag game. Part of the game was that some of the kids had real guns. Long story short, I got shot in the face and fell down "dead" with a big hole in my forehead.
So I lay there awhile, trying to lie still in my pool of slow-spreading blood. Watching the other kids run past me, laughing and playing. Then I got up and started playing again, still with the bullet-hole in my head. The other kids who saw me stopped, getting all serious. They told me in low voices, disapproving tones: "Stop it!" "You're dead, you have to lie down." "You're not playing right!" It seemed unfair to me, but I grumbled a bit and lay back down anyway.
But even apart from my general sense of invulnerability, my dream life has never been realistic enough to fool anyone. It isn't that I automatically know "I'm dreaming now" (although sometimes I do come to that realization). It's more that the essential character of my dreamlife is so different from real life, that I have learned to instinctively act differently, and expect different things, when I'm dreaming.
I guess I used to have nightmares. But since I knew on some level that I couldn't really be harmed, they lacked teeth. Still, there were certain disturbing incidents that would occur and reoccur. A big one was the tidal wave. I grew up on an island on the Jersey shore - a summer beach town. So it's entirely surrounded by water, as befits an island. The problem was that, ever since I saw The Poseidon Adventure on tv as a small child, I could not look out to sea in a dream. If I did, I knew what would happen: if I kept my eyes on the horizon, I would soon see a long white line stretching across that horizon: the breaking foam of an approaching tidal wave.
And if I averted my eyes quickly - it would never come in! I could go back to playing in the sand, or chatting with friends, or whatever. Sunning myself. Secure in the knowledge that as long as I studiously avoided looking out at the horizon, everyone on that beach would be safe.
One time I said: screw it! Bring it on, wave-boy! I stood on top of a dune just at the edge of the beach (it was winter; no beachgoers in jeopardy) and tried to stare that thing down. But there was no chicken in this wave. It just kept coming on. By the time it hit the shore it was a foaming, crashing monster - at least sixty feet high and thundering like a hundred freight trains! It smashed the entire beach, overbore me and swept me all the way down 11th Street South, collapsing rows of buildings on either side of the street as it went. I body-surfed for four blocks. It was pretty fun actually. After that, the tidal wave wasn't such a menace, but it remained a major annoyance. I mean, I wasn't really scared of it anymore, but if I was interested at all in what was already going on in the dream...a rampaging wall of water is a sure bet to change the whole course of the plot.
It was always things like that. I knew as a child that if I was playing outside the house, and the thought occurred to me that there might be a Tyrannosaurus Rex coming down the block from the general direction of the golf course...sure enough, that's all it would take. I had to get inside real quick (or more likely, in slow-motion, since I was never able to move fast once that thought took hold). One time, after the T. Rex loped by while I peeked at it through the rec room blinds, it occurred to me to try an experiment: what if I tried as hard as I could to visualize an X-Wing from Star Wars, waiting for me out on the front lawn? It worked! Sort of. I think the deliberate effort had brought me pretty far out of the dream. I could make my way out of the house, and walk around my new X-Wing. I was even able to climb onto it and into the open cockpit, but it was all pretty hazy and indistinct. I couldn't get the damn thing to work.
I didn't really need an X-Wing, though. I could fly, in my dreams. If I set my mind to it, I could do just about anything. I was pretty great at flying, too. I could soar high and straight and far - until I saw "The Greatest American Hero." Damn the power of suggestion!
Anyway, as my life has gone on, my dream life has become just lamer and lamer. There doesn't really seem to be anything I can't do, and nobody's really impressed by any of it. Some tough guy was threatening me, so I picked up a car over my head and said, "back off!" He wasn't even concerned. It was like he knew it was a dream, too! Maybe he did.
Sometimes, frustrated by its inability to get up a decent nightmare, my unconscious mind tries to trick me with something stupefyingly boring. That used to happen back in high school a lot. I'd be stuck taking a test or something. But my dream can never keep a straight face for very long. Sooner or later, something completely wacked-out would happen ever-so-casually, and I'd realize "god-damn it! It's another dream! I am NOT taking this test." At that point I'd throw my desk through the wall and take off on foot, generally chased by priests and dogs. Catholic school, you see.
The same thing would happen later, at work. I was always careful, upon realizing that "it's all a dream!", to make my escape in a manner that would not be physically possible to my waking self. This was a precaution. I was always wary of the possibility that I might one day say to myself, "hey! This is a dream! I'm not wasting my dream time at work, I'm cutting out!" - only to find out that it was not in fact a dream, after all. Leaving me to explain to my confused co-workers why exactly I would choose to leave for the day by picking up a chair, throwing it through the glass enclosing the office, and diving through the resultant hole.
Which brings me to my other complaint: why do school and work have to be so boring that one finds it preferable to spend one's time being chased by priests and dogs?
No comments:
Post a Comment