I Dream in Stupid
When I was younger I used to dream a lot — vivid dreams, too — that I would often remember well after waking. In fact, I still distinctly remember several dreams I had as a kid. It concerns me a bit then that for the past several years I’ve been having pretty dreamless sleep. Well, up until the past couple months. Still, these dreams are fragmented and fleeting. I’ll wake up, think about it for a bit, go back to sleep and completely forget everything that happened. However in very, very recent weeks, a few have stuck in memory for more than a few waking seconds and they all have one very strange thing in common: They make absolutely no fucking sense.
Right, right, I know. Dreams aren’t SUPPOSED to make sense, but the level of abstraction these recent dreams have been reaching boggles me. Case in point: The dream I remember from last night. Visually the dream was nothing spectacular. I spent most of it exploring an abandoned house in a neighborhood I didn’t recognize. The only real defining feature of this house was the fact that it had dirt floors. That was it, that was the entire dream. But it wasn’t the dream’s content, it was the strange feeling my dream-representation-of-myself was experiencing while exploring this house. I had this deep, deep feeling of regret for having, at some unspecified time in the past, consumed human flesh. My dream-representation-of-myself knew that I wasn’t actually responsible for the act; I was somehow tricked into it, but I couldn’t shake this awful feeling of wanting to “take back” having eaten people meat and being absolutely powerless to do so. It was an indescribably unsettling feeling. Makes sense, then, that I might go explore an abandoned house to take my mind off things. What?
You know when a dream is vivid enough that upon waking you have to stop and think about it for a while? When there’s sometimes a brief period of uncertainty before your mind is completely convinced it was a dream? For example, the night before I moved to Portland I had a dream that my car, after getting packed with all of my belongings, was broken into and EVERYTHING I owned was stolen. I actually had to go check the car in the morning when I awoke to put my mind at ease. That makes sense. The fact that today I was briefly unsure if I had somehow eaten human flesh? Well, I believe that is me going completely fucking insane.
April 20th, 2008 at 11:49 am
It’s the vegans of Portland entering your subconscious mind, that’s how they getcha.
April 21st, 2008 at 4:37 pm
Who says that “If slaghterhouses had glass walls” propaganda I sent to you had no effect, right? Alcohol makes you not dream, dreams last only 2-3 seconds. I read it somewhere, must be true.
April 21st, 2008 at 4:43 pm
Wow, what CAN’T alcohol do?
April 22nd, 2008 at 9:55 am
get you pregnant
April 22nd, 2008 at 7:20 pm
thats bullshit you think a documentary like Junior was filmed without alcohol