Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Alice In Wonderland Dreams

Alice In Wonderland

OK - this was one of the first entries that I almost entirely censored.  It was…mostly irrelevant.  I started out talking about one thing and went entirely off on an almost indecipherable tangent.  I saved the tangent and will take a look at it sometime next week and see if it makes any sense.

I am in the final days of the project so my brain is firing in a hundred different directions simultaneously.  What I wanted to write about was…exactly that, a brain firing.

Stress suppresses many things (and this is where I got totally lost on a stress related tangent that I will explore later).  One of the things high stress suppresses is dreams.  I am a frequent and vivid dreamer with a strong visual imagination and excellent recall. 

I have noticed over the last couple of months that the frequency, coherency, and vividness of my dreams has been diminishing.  On more than one occasion I have gone to sleep thinking about something (usually work related, sometimes personal) and woke up - right into the middle of the continuation of the same thought.  As if all I did while sleeping was take an interval in the middle of the thought stream.

Additionally, looking back through my journal, I can see I tossed out a lot of dream fragments - but not very many complete dreams (relatively).  In the last couple of weeks the dreams were mostly - either the memories of dreams (with no conscious recollection of the dream itself), or simply "strange thoughts upon waking".

Well, last night the dream dam burst and kicked out a cascade of dream images - all at once.  No structure, no coherency, no semblance of a narrative.  Just a bunch of images - dropped - as I woke.  I sat there on the edge of the bed in the half light and scribbled fierce notes in the journal I keep by my bed.  I think I managed to capture most of them.  A couple of them were coherent enough that I recognized the people in the dream images and I sent out a handful of email this morning telling them about the images.

In no particular order, here are the images I saw cascading out in vivid dream images.

V. was sitting on a giant hand cooking something on a hibachi.  It was an actual giant hand.


B. was splashing through a stream choked with the run off of dirty snow. She was weaving in and out of the stream as if she was running.

J. was lifting a giant tire, as if he was Atlas.

K. was sitting on the edge of a car, throwing darts at balloons blowing by in the wind.

D. was sitting at the breakfast bar in a diner, showing two Bigfoot's how to work the juke box station.  (Do you remember those? When you used to go to a diner they had little tiny control modules in each booth and at intervals along the counter to play the juke box?)

I. and D. stopped by because they were in town visiting their daughter.  They brought me fresh baked sausage bread and a basket of fresh beets.

Cyborg rabbits were watching someone's house with night vision. (I could tell they were cyborgs because they had glowing red eyes, like the Terminator.)

I was laying in the dirt next to a giant old log, on my back, watching the sun move through the trees and smelling the rich damp earth.

Someone called, I picked up the phone and they talked to me in a language I could not hear, but understood.  I have no recollection of what I was told.

I crossed through a tree line and could see a field filled with giant needles, their eyelets glistening in the sun.

In the golden light of the morning sun, I could see a hand, first laying on a stomach, and then lightly stroking a lover with grazing finger tips.

All of the dream images had a very "Alice in Wonderland" feel to them that I would call "brighter than life", as if they were in Technicolor or something similar.

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