When I was a boy, among my adventure fantasies was being a fighter pilot. There was something tremendously exciting to me in the idea of traveling at superhigh speeds and concentrating not just on the flight path ahead, but on the split-second change in circumstances in all three dimensions at once. You’d have to keep looking up, behind, down, to both sides… and never, ever relax.
(One obvious fallacy seems never to have occurred to me: if Dad’s characteristic high-speed highway driving gave me the willies, as it did, in actual aerial combat I’d almost certainly bail out more often than not.)
Later, fresh out of college, I first worked not as the English teacher I’d been trained to become, but as a cab driver — a position for which, excuse the boast, I was eminently suited.
Two apparently unrelated factoids about my life, separated from each other (and from now) by decades. But if you let your conceptual vision blur just a bit, you might discern the connection: spatial relationships; geography.
For whatever reason, I’ve always been interested in, not to say obsessive about, how one gets from here to there. Even now, I can spend hours poring over maps and atlases; Google Maps (and its macro-offspring, Google Earth and Google Sky) would be like a crack pipe to me if I let it. Furthermore, I’m blessed (or cursed) with a good intuitive sense of direction, so after I’ve driven someplace once I can almost always get back to it without conscious thought. (I say “cursed” only because this sometimes makes me impatient with others’ reluctance to venture into unfamiliar territory.) I actually hold a mental map of the route, including landmarks, traffic bottlenecks, relationship to other routes to other nearby destinations, and so on.
This obsession extends, bizarrely, even into my dreams. I notice and generally remember how I’ve “gotten” from one place to another. As my dream life goes on over the course of years, I recognize intersections I’ve “been to” before (although I’ve never seen them in real life). And, what’s more, I sometimes record these routes — write them up the morning after, in the course of recording especially notable dreams.
(Yes, I’ve tried to keep paper and pen by the bedside so I can jot them down at the moment, so to speak. It never works for me: I’m too caught up in my dreams to want to wake up.)
The most recent such report took me about an hour to write on Saturday morning, when I should have been working on Seems to Fit instead. You can read it here (irrelevant, non-setting-related portions excised, and hyperlinks to real-world places added (because — ha ha — doing so gives me a chance to use Google Maps)).
In the meantime: how about you? Is there any ongoing thread to what happens between your ears as you sleep? Consider the common “Color or black-and-white?” question. Beyond that, though, think of your dreams as a very particular sort of fiction. Do you tend to remember the plots the next morning? or are you a character specialist? what about dialogue?
Have you had the deja vu moment in which you come to a real place for the first time… and realize you’ve already been there in your dreams? Do you find yourself dreaming about the same things, people, places, even in non-recurring dreams, even spread out over years or decades?
C’mon. Spill.
This is a conversation that could go on and on. But to spill…
Most of my life I’ve dreamed about water–usually the lake in front of the house I grew up in. The water is rarely scary–it is just there.
The other thing is how often I dream about needing privacy and finding none. This problem I dream about every week, sometimes every night. Usually in the dream I need a place to do something you don’t want to do in front of people–go to the bathroom, take a shower, or whatever, ahem–and either the walls are missing or the walls disappear just when I shut the door and think, “Ah, finally, a private place.” Then the walls begin to vanish, often into water below.
Take that Freud!
That’s enough dream talk for today.
marta: You’ve mentioned dreaming about water before, either here or at your place, but I think this is the first glimpse I’ve had at the specifics. Haunting! — not even counting the obvious contradiction in aspiring to a public life, while panicking at the loss of privacy.
(Your blog’s title, writing in the water, has always struck me as perfect for a writer’s blog — especially a writer who’s uncertain of his/her place in storytelling, his/her permanence, etc. It occurs to me now, though, that the title may be connected to the waterdreams. ???)
Lots of talk about dreams ’round the blogosphere today. Interesting, I think.
For me dreams are always in vivid color. There are almost never supernatural elements like human flight or magical powers. I have to drive to wherever I’m going and I seem to be going someplace quite often in my dreams — a fair percentage of them involve cars in some way.
I am always myself despite having others I “know” change faces, bodies, locations, whatever. I have more than once read in my dreams, whether a traffic sign or a piece of paper with writing on it. This seems to be rare, but it happens pretty routinely for me.
Do I remember them? Only when they occur immediately before a full-waking. If I drift up through layers of unconsciousness to arrive at waking, no. Not a prayer. Sometimes even immediate waking doesn’t help. Before I can manage to gain full control of my limbs the details and images fade to almost indecipherable bits.
In my dreams, I am always young — mid-20s, maybe — and always fit and thin and taller. Always, without fail.
Why not? If I’m gonna dream, I might as well BE my dream, right?
Darc: Something in the air, mayhap. Thanks to the mostly opaque curtain drawn over blogs by my friends here in work, I haven’t (yet) seen any of the other dream-related posts.
Glad to see I’m not the only one who dreams not just of events at Place Y, but also of how I got from X to Y in the first place. I thought it was some sort of freakish habit!
A main recurring feature of my dreams which I failed to mention above is the search. Not since I was a kid have I dreamt (AFAIK) of being pursued, but I’m often looking for someone or something else. Which provides plenty of opportunity to, um, y’know, go places.
I have absolutely no idea whether my dreams are in colour or not – which I’m thinking probably means they’re in colour. If they were in black and white, then that would be something to remember, right? (It’s like the Marshall McLuhan thesis: we don’t know who first discovered water, but we can be pretty sure it wasn’t a fish. Oops, here we go, talking about water, again!)
Speaking of which, I’ve had a recurring nightmare of drowning ever since I was a child. And it doesn’t take Freud to realise it’s really a dream about abandonment, because I’m usually screaming for help to someone who has his/her back to me and can’t/won’t hear me. Besides, I’m a very strong swimmer who would likely only drown if I were unconscious when going in the water. So no screaming …
Like Darc, I’m myself only younger and the funny thing is my kids are the age they are now. And then the kids sometimes become the siblings. But I’m not ever at my house now, I’m almost always in our old hometown at that house.
I’ve used dreams once or twice as a basis for a plot line, but they always seem to fizzle. I never finish the story.
And when I dream of water, I’m almost always about to be submerged by a HUGE wall of water from which there is no escape. (sideline–do you remember the part in the book Lucifer’s Hammer and the surfer catches a tsumani?) And I know it’s coming and I know there’s no where to go…I usually wake up pretty quickly before it gets me, but the anticipation of actually getting hit with it, makes my skin crawl. I cannot swim a stroke, pure terror.
@John – I’ve been meaning to write about that blog name…
This is fascinating, though I don’t think I have any fascinating responses.
Lately, I’ve been having Mother’s-Worst-Nightmare-types of dreams, including yet another one last night. The kind you think are actually happening and, when you wake to find they aren’t, are so relieved.
I have a recurring dream about a math or science class (can’t remember which) that I haven’t gone to in a long time, and I just know I’m failing it — but I can’t bring myself to go anyway.
A very twisty, turny Victorian-type house also shows up in my dreams a lot. As if I know it, but we’ve talked about that before.
Wow, my dreams sound anxious. I promise I don’t sit around fretting all the time.
I am particularly fond of the dreams in which those you loved and lost to this world show up. Those are truly a gift.
You would be very frustrated with my sense of direction. And didn’t I tell you once that someone needs to do a book of maps from children’s lit? Let’s do it together.
Tessa: I’m a very weak swimmer. (I guess a more positive way to phrase that would be to say I’m a very strong sinker.) Maybe for this reason, I’ve suppressed all dreams having to do with drowning.
But in a recent dream (on the same night as the one I recorded here), I did see members of my family in a big ol’ ramshackle house which sat in the middle of a very shallow sea. This water wasn’t threatening, though; it was merely isolating. No one could get to us, and we couldn’t get out.
cynth: That hometown plays a role in many of my dreams, too, although not so much the house. Whatever THAT means.
My favorite thing in your comment is that you and your kids appear (true?) to be about the same age. I can’t imagine there’s any hidden meaning at all there!
marta: Please do — if not a full blog post, at least squeezed into your “About” page or something!
Jules: Those parents’-worst-nightmares dreams are a main reason why I’m glad not to have kids of my own. And I’ve never had uncles’ or stepfathers’-worst-nightmare dreams, knock on wood.
For many years, I had a recurring dream of being in an astronomical observatory and carrying around these big fat gleaming-metal poles. Logic would seem to dictate that they must have been telescopes, but that didn’t seem to be the case. What they were actually like were enormous stubby knitting needles — like with dull tips, not sharp ones. I encourage you to remember that although this dream was common during my teen years, sometimes a knitting needle is just a knitting needle.
Ha!