Dreams

For me, dreaming has always been an odd thing. It was not until I was in tech school in Texas that I discovered sleeping without nightmares, terrors or being awakened by every sound. I was, and am still to some extent, so light a sleeper that it was not uncommon for me to wake myself up rolling over.

Tech school led me to the airman’s club, and beer. Beer made sleep a less terrible, frightening place to be. Unfortunately it made being awake a nightmare. But enough of that. This is about dreams.

There are those that believe dreams mean something, are telling or attempting to tell. Are releasing or showing what is trapped. Are glimpses to the past or the future. Are the guides to greater things. There are those that believe dreams count. I am not one of them.

All the years that I slept through my dreams were some of the best. On rare occasions I had brief, fleeting recollections, usually right after waking up. Then they would, after just a moment, be gone, as if the memory was itself a dream. The even more rare happening of me recalling a dream was pretty often a huge let down.  For some reason I recalled, in crazy detail, dreams of grocery shopping. I could make a list of what I purchased in my dreams, one or even two days later.

It has been pointed out before that without alcohol sleeping was a chore. It became the same chore, if not worse, when I stopped. Sleeping became quite the joy when I was turned on to Zoloft. Nice, peaceful,  seven to eight complete hours. Lovely! I had not, until the last six months, ever known what all the hoopla about sleeping was. This is some good stuff!

Until I started to dream again. Well, recall my dreams I suppose is the accurate thing to say. I know, we all dream all the time. So be it. No matter how I say it, the it is, the last four or five weeks, I have been recalling my dreams. Some good, some great, many not so good or great.  So, what do dreams mean? Anyone?

Explain this one to me, every day for five consecutive days I have had the dream that I am waking up, walking into the bathroom and finding my toothbrush floating in the toilet. I suppose it could mean something. Certainly more interesting than choosing between brown or white eggs or asking the clerk how to tell if a honeydew is ripe.

There have been a lot of people in my dreams of late. People I know now and some I have known. Some I had forgotten and one in particular I have never stopped remembering. There were a few of those wrong people in wrong place dreams – you know, a high school teacher as news reporter asking you about how you saved a penguin from a car accident. Stuff like that.

Then there are the “oh my” dreams about/with people you have not, nor should you probably be “oh mying” with.  Or the being really hungry on the plane dream and no matter what you do, that damned flight attendant only gets without one seat before heading the other way again. Or the one about polishing a giant read stiletto heel. Big as a car and so tall you need a latter to reach the top.

Among all these odd and entertaining recollections, past the scary and sick, the naughty and the flat out gibberish, there is one that has remained locked in place. A dream while sleeping of something have dreamt about while awake. An event, experience, a moment so longed for,  hoped for, thought about and through and over and around, a chance. A dream of something so special, and a dream so real, so solid, life like, in color, with scent and texture and pure sound, feeling. I don’t know if I cried for having actually been able to recall it or because the reality that is was in fact just a dream.

I am sitting here with tears in my eyes, on my face, shirt, the back of my hands. I still do not know which is the reason. I have been thinking all day of going to sleep, to be there again, exactly the same way. If only I could know. Will I get to feel like this/that again? I thought I would never feel it again in my life. Even if only in a dream, it was a gift. ( G-Rated dream by the way, no “oh my” at all)

I do not know what to think or believe about dreams. I do know it is amazing to me that, no matter how real, perfect, as it should be, how much feeling carried over, that it was only me that knows of the dream. I am the only one that had it. No one else even knows it happened.  Maybe that is part of the cause of the tears. I cannot share with you what you where there for. Thank you.

Peace, Ant-Knee