Dreams & Nightmares

Like everyone else, I have dreams – by which I mean, the weird movies in my mind when I sleep.  Some are more interesting and fun than others (though far too few wet dreams for my liking – no more than 3 in my whole life), but very few are truly terrifying: nightmares.  As an adult, I rarely have nightmares, even when under stress or difficult times.  Most of my dreams are dull and forgettable, with a few truly memorable ones which I sometimes write down if they are really good. [It’s too bad we’ve yet to figure out how to RECORD dreams.]

 When I was a kid, however, the nightmares were more frequent and terrifying.  I suppose our imaginations are 10x more powerful, and our reason and intellect are a fraction of what they are now, so our fears take a more prominent role in our daily and nightly lives.

 My particular “concern” was ghosts and the supernatural.  A TV that continues broadcasting even when the plug is pulled; mysterious footsteps upstairs in the house when everyone is downstairs.   Faceless strangers, robots, etc. – and the paranoia that EVERYONE is secretly a robot assassin.  Ruthless but mortal killers with axes and chainsaws were never scary to me.  To this date I find Jason or Freddy Krueger more annoying than fearsome.

 Walk-through.  Naturally when you’re a kid, you’re scared of the dark.  Your overactive imagination sees the darkness as a tabla rasa, a blank slate upon which to project all sorts of imaginary terrors which evaporate in any meaningful amount of light, even a nightlight.  For some reason parents consistently seem to forget this.  Also, I had this belief – I don’t know why – that if I ran through the house I would have nightmares, so if I was to walk to my parents’ bedroom for solace, I’d have to do so VERY slowly.  And this meant walking past the stairway leading down to the ground floor, a huge void of darkness: yet another blank slate for fertile imagination to fill with all sorts of weird and terrifying images. 

            To make matters worse, our stairway to the basement creaked.  Not such an issue when you’re walking down, but when you’re walking up, and the lights are off beneath and behind you, it really gives you the strong impression that the newly restored darkness has instantly summoned forth its legion of demons who are now walking up the stairs immediately behind you.  RUN UP! NOW! 

 Exams.  In college, I would frequently wake up in my room in Paris, after a dream that I was back in College Park oversleeping through, or failing, exams.  That was a frequent “nightmare”, though more accurately described as stressful than terrifying.  Plus as soon as I realized I was in Paris, I also knew I had successfully navigated the end of semester exams and had not flown overseas completely forgetting an entire exam.

 People who know me well will laugh at this: I’ve had a few “nightmares” about my car (1992 Pontiac Firebird Formula, black on black): either it catches fire and is completely ruined (without me inside), a massive accident which totals it (again, I’m unharmed), or Tim the body shop guy has “painted” it dull black primer and pronounces it “done”.  WHAT??  Yeah, nowadays that’s what generally passes for a nightmare for me.

 A few more recent, legitimate “nightmares”:  I caused my brother to fall off scaffolding, landing on his head, which disintegrated, killing him instantly.  THAT one caused me to wake up immediately.  Or I was magically deformed into a misshapen monkey in an old-fashioned suit (“YOU HAVE CHOSEN YOUR FORM!”), emerging onto a busy street circa 1910, in grainy black & white – as if REAL LIFE back then was in fact the same black & white as we see in the movies of that era; that in itself was disturbing enough.

 Delirium.  This is even worse than nightmares, as nightmares end when you wake up.  But a high fever combined with delirium is the worst.  Nightmares which don’t turn off when you wake up or open your eyes!  Plus you’re sick and hot and sweaty, and you don’t know what’s going on.  I saw entire cities of faceless robots or ghosts.  Truly horrifying, and there is NO escape until the fever breaks and finally passes.  It would be disturbing enough for an adult, but for a child it’s indescribable. 

 My Dad.  We like to believe that the dearly departed communicate with us through dreams, but I’ve yet to see any evidence of that.  Since my father died in December 2004, I’ve had two dreams about him. 

            In July 2010, I dreamed that he told me I would joining him in a month – which kind of freaked me out, even though he was referring to a cloudy place with harps and pearly gates.  That month passed by with no summons.  I’m still here, so that must have been a false alarm. 

            Another dream illustrates the idea that these posthumous appearances are more likely due to our imagination and not true messages from the afterlife: someone was horribly injured (arm or leg cut off), and my father took him in a car to find a hospital.  After about 30 minutes of fruitless searching around town (looked like South Central L.A. to me) my dad simply GAVE UP and dumped the poor guy by the side of the road and told him, “you’re on your own.  Good luck.”  1000% out of character for my dad.  He either would have found the local E.R. immediately or called 911 and got the ambulance to come.  He would NOT have simply dumped the guy off like that.  I’m not the hero my dad was, but even I can dial 911.

 Ex’s.  I have to admit I have had a few dreams including former GFs.  Not very often (not often enough?) and they are remarkably tame considering the nature of the relationships.  Even odds for the woman to act in character in the dream or an outcome which bears any resemblance – better or worse – than the actual situation.  What’s even weirder, is in the rare occasion that a dream does involve intimacy, probably 80% of the time the partner is a woman I don’t recognize: not personally and not Angelina Jolie or Scarlett Johannson. 

 Prophecy.  None of my dreams have come true: but they have been so odd and inconsistent that I don’t think that’s likely anyway.  We talk about “Dreams” as if we go to bed and dream of the things we really want in life, in a coherent fashion, and then wake up thinking, “I really wish my elementary school would turn into an aquarium stocked with fish looking like Ewan McGregor speaking Yiddish backwards.  Why don’t my dreams come true??”  Our real dreams are too weird and fantastic to become reality.  The easiest way to make your “dreams come true” is simply to be continually dosed on LSD.  Somehow I don’t think that’s practical, or even desirable.  Get real.

 Childhood.  Looking back, despite having had nightmares so often as a kid, the happy truth is that those nightmares were the sole source of fear and anxiety in my childhood.  So many kids around the world have real lives which we would think of as nightmares: child soldiers in Africa; child prostitutes in Bangkok; blind beggars in India; Jerry Springer offspring in the US (e.g. poor kid in “Breaking Bad” – Jesse went to get his money back from “Spoog” and his wife, she ended up killing Spoog with an ATM machine because he called her a skank); and so on.  I survived my nightmares, but these children can scarcely escape the horrible realities of their lives, except by the most heroic of efforts or interventions.  I’m glad my nightmares were no more than that.