Epic dreams last night. I can’t remember all of them, since I was in and out of sleep several times and every re-entry was a new episode, a new chapter. I honestly don’t know where my mind gets everything it does… My subconscious must be absorbing so much more than I know.
So I can only remember bits and pieces. An early “chapter” saw me walking through a series of underground passageways not unlike the walkways through an uncommonly big subway station in a large city. Evidently I was en route to a sporting event of sorts, since at one point I remember feeling I was almost at my destination, and I was surrounded by very British-looking football (that’s “soccer” to us yanks) fans, all carrying on with cockney accents and whatnot… I encountered several people on my travels through the underground tunnels, and the whole affair took on a tone similar to one in a tragic art film involving aimless twentysomethings. We gamboled around, we disturbed the mechandise of the shops along the way, laughed and ran around, but I knew it all had to end sometime, and it did.
Later on, in another lapse of a dream, I was driving parallel to the coast on a four-lane parkway of sorts, early on in some sort of run-down sedan, but later in a white sports coupe (I can tell you what kind if you really want to know–heh). I was in the middle of a gridlock traffic jam, and the drivers around me were getting irritated. Eventually the obstruction causing the traffic jam was circumvented, and the drivers around me gunned it in order to get back up to speed. I did too, and found myself in front. But there was a sharp bend up ahead, and while my car made it around, tires squealing at the limits of adhesion, most of the vehicles behind me weren’t so fortunate, most ending up perched over the guardrail, and one, whose driver I apparently knew, punching clean through the guardrail and sailing off the edge, down the cliff, and into the water below. I slammed on the brakes, stopped the car, and got out. I rushed over to the edge and looked down into the water, but didn’t see so much as a ripple. I climbed down the rocks and crags, hollow and jagged from the churning of the waves, down to a small ledge just at the edge of the water. I took off my shoes and jacket, turned on my flashlight, and jumped in. I didn’t find it too hard to hold my breath as I swam around in the dark water, flashlight beam darting about. I only saw debris from the crash, items that had been in the car, until I swam deeper, though a few successive cavities in the ocean’s floor. I saw more debris, bigger chunks, and then I finally spotted my friend, draped lifeless over an outcropping. I grabbed hold of them, and swam as best I could through the intervening caves and openings up to the surface. Once there I hoisted them onto the ledge and started giving mouth-to-mouth, when it occurred to me to take a pulse. It was there, but very faint and erratic. I continued my efforts at resuscitation, and by and by they came to, sputtering water, hacking and coughing. I don’t remember much after that.
What’s unique about dreams is that they can have a mood altogether unrelated to the familiarity or complete strangeness of the environment at hand. It’s almost like I become someone else in each dream–or not even that; that I remain myself, but I’m in a different state of life, with different concerns and priorities, some aspects of my personality magnified, some inhibitions gone, and some present to a greater degree. I’m in an altered state. The obvious result of this inevitability is that it becomes impossible to communicate afterwards the overwhelming mood present in each dream… It’s like trying to describe with words how chocolate tastes different than, say, spaghetti. The best that can be hoped for is a mediocre approximation. But I want to remember, though I may not know why…