January 20, 2007

• Dreaming

  I recall being outside a suburban house, and there were birds in the sky, silhouetted in the twilight. They weren't very high up, just above my head. One was carrying a spire and weathervane, the kind you'd see on top of a Victorian mansion. The other... I grabbed it out of the sky. It grabbed me back; its wings were hands.

  My wife... Or at least the woman came out of the house and wondered what I was doing, and I showed her the bird made of hands. "Hands. It's made of hands." She didn't understand; birds aren't made of hands. "Here, look." And I showed her, but then we were looking to where the birds had been flying.

  The end of the pine forest suburban street expanded into a clearing of rolling hills. Bright, late-afternoon sunlight bathed the scene. The sky was full of the sun, as if the Earth had switched places with Mercury. There was a building at the foot of the hill, and we went it. I say 'we,' but who were we? Who was I with? I don't know.

  The building was a sort of play place, like Chuck E. Cheese, but no food. The walls and floor were blue, with a pattern of the logo of the place. And they moved. Part of the premise of this place was that you could put money into slots in various weird machines, like arcade games, but not really. You'd put the coin in the slot in a certain way, and the machine might give you a prize if you were skillful enough. The floors and walls moved in small jerks, just to mess up your coin-dropping technique and add challenge. There were children running around trying to get their prizes, and their parents looked on, talking among themselves.

  I found a machine that was sort of like a doll house. I climbed in and looked for the coin slot, but there was none. A little girl pointed out that it was broken. Emerging, I realized I had been at war, and the company around me would never get the prize. There were four of us, with long brown wool overcoats covering our dress uniforms. There was dust and fighting, and the oppressive sun was our enemy. Of the four of us, there was one who was obviously doomed. The other three of us were always seperate from him, even though he was our buddy. Other soldiers would dive into the bright light, absorbed by it, taken beyond to something promising. Something we didn't really need to fight. We stood in the hallway of this weird blue game room on the jerking floor, looking at each other, not sure how to proceed.

  ---

  This is, by the way, a recurring dream I've had for years. The hand-bird is new, though.

  Dreams unfold and re-assemble for me. They riff on themselves and sometimes remix, with recurring sections interspersed with new parts. Dream interpretation books talk about single symbols as being important, but for me whole narratives involving multiple symbols get juggled around, like subroutines of a computer program.

  I also believe that, through some mechanism yet to be understood, dreams are (or at least can be) cooperative. Meaning, groups of people can dream together, and not necessarily by consent. I think the hand-bird was someone else having a very interesting experience in their dream world. As soon as I pulled it out of the sky, it became less like a living thing and more like a prop. Its dreamer switched to a new narrative, away from the story of the hand-bird chasing the other bird (which, in their experience, might have been a car chase or a conversation or who knows what). In my dream, I was left with the form but not the essence.

  So. More dreams. Is the bit above the line more or less dream-like than the few paragraphs you just read? Which is more muddled and confusing?

  • 4:03 am
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