Living The Dream
I am a prolific dreamer and I have been for years. While it makes for some interesting stories when I wake up and say to myself, “What the hell was that?”, it also makes it difficult to sleep with me, or so my wife claims. Apparently, I toss and turn and twitch and jerk around while I’m doing God knows what with God knows who in only God knows where. While you might be inclined to think that I’d be exhausted in the morning, the truth is that I’ve been dreaming so much for so long that whatever few hours a night that I sleep, it just feels normal to me.
I’ve only had one dream that repeated itself a bunch of times and that was when I was a kid. Back then, I dreamt at least a dozen times that there was a giant bomb in the attic at my cousin’s house. Somehow there was a general consensus among my “loved ones” that I should be the one sent up into the attic to defuse the bomb. Personally, I didn’t think that I was the best choice since I was like eight years old. Plus, in my opinion there was probably more expendable options than me. I mean, I was pretty damn cute with my curly blonde hair and blue eyes and I had no expertise in playing with bombs. Plus there were six people in the group who were older than me. Two of them were full grown men, and one of them was my father. I have no idea if the dream meant that I had the desire to be a hero, or I thought my family was making it clear that if someone was going to possibly die defusing the bomb, well…. send Brian. The good news is that I always woke up before the diffusing and exploding took place.
A couple of nights ago I dreamt that my wife and I were on a sailboat we once owned. We were sailing along in the deep blue, wide open sea, minding our own business when I suddenly realized that the back of our sailboat had somehow transformed into a large flat area where there were four or five people, men and women, trying to haul in one of those fishing nets that are about a mile long. I was mesmerized as I watched them pulling and tugging on the endless net that held a spattering of fish. Then I turned toward the front of our sailboat/commercial fishing vessel, (yes, I know that that is nonsensical), and suddenly realized that the wide open sea was gone and we had sailed up into some sort of Asian, Venice-like, ghetto canal that was filled with the hustle-bustle of local workers and marketers and other people just doing what they do in Asian city dreamland. I presumed that in the next few minutes we were going to start snagging small boats and workers up in our net. In the split second that I pondered what this might lead to in my dream, it didn’t feel like it was going to end well for me.
That’s when I said, “Holy shit!” and woke up. I mean what else could I do? We had about a mile of fish filled net winding through a busy canal. We were in an Asian ghetto and I had no idea exactly where we were. China? Vietnam? Hong Kong? Bangkok? Who the hell knew? I had no idea of how we got there or what we were supposed to do next. The only thing left for me to do was to wake up, so that is what I did.
I would like to say that the dream was something abnormal for me, but in reality I have dreams like that on a weekly basis. Sometimes more often than that. I would also like to believe that the dreams are meaningful or creative or mentally healthy or enlightening or a revelation of some sort of self-awareness or pretty much anything else that could be construed as positive bullshit. I would also like a lot of other things that are not likely going to happen, so I guess the useful spin on my dreams will have to be put on the unfulfilled list and not pondered all that much. Still, the questions remain.
What causes my dreams? Who knows.
Are they good for me or bad for me? Who knows.
Will they ever stop? Who knows.
Do I want them to stop? Who knows.
All I know is that a few nights ago we were sailing in the wide open sea and about five seconds later we were not.
I’m not even going to bother to get into the story of me having a run-in with a Caribbean mob boss at an ATM.
All I know about my dreams is that it’s highly likely that I wake up and say, “What the hell was that?” a lot more than most folks do.
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