Wednesday, July 15, 2015

Dream Symbolism for the Extremely Dense

As I grow older, my dreams seem to be dropping all attempts at nuance or complex symbolism in favor of slapping me in the face with the Trout of Obviousness.

It's the one on the right.
Last night, following a bout of imsomnia likely brought on by hours of anxiously waiting to hear that Precocious Daughter had landed safely in New York (she did, after a 90-minute delay), I was delivered a whopping Captain Obvious-fueled dream about my life. Freud would have seen interpreting this dream as an affront to his professional dignity.

"I can't even with this dream. smh. lol" is I believe what
he would have said.
So, I dreamed I repeatedly jumped or fell from a crumbling structure and plunged into deep water, struggling - but always managing - to swim to the surface before I drowned.

Sometimes I was foiling a crime. Sometimes I had sidekicks. There was a sighting of the late Omar Sharif. But that was the scene that played out in my sleeping brain, with minor variations for dramatic effect, over and over until my alarm went off.

My subconscious is being unsubtle. Presumably it's had enough of my nonsense and is reduced to screaming "YOU GOT THIS! GEEZ!!!" from inside my head.

Perhaps you agree with my subconscious on this. I am sounding like a broken record these days.

This one. It's probably a disco record, and it's
endlessly skipping on the Bee-Gees singing
"Ah-ah-ah-ah, st--Ah-ah-ah-ah, st--"

Jumping, crumbling, plunging, struggling, surviving. What does it mean?

Sometimes you gotta hit in me in the head with the message. Or with a door.

Here's another part of my dream: I was invited to a party on a boat. There were two access points: One led to people talking and laughing, the other would allow me to explore a different, but empty, part of the boat. I took the latter. But it turns out that what I thought were two entrances to the same boat were actually two separate boats, and the one I was on came loose from its moorings and started to drift. When I drifted into view of the party boat, my boat capsized, and the people just laughed at me and went back to their party.

I woke up before I could discover whether I survived that misadventure.

But I'm pretty sure I know the answer.

2 comments:

  1. Clearly these dreams mean you've fallen asleep reading Carl Jung's Modern Man In Search of a Soul, in particular the part about a man who had a dream of driving too high and losing control of his car. Jung told him this meant he shouldn't try to move up in life. The man tried to and was a failure. Good job, Carl, for planting that seed of doubt! Maybe if you had kept your big yap shut that guy would have succeeded.

    And your boat wasn't sinking. It was descending to where The Fish Slapping Dance would happen.

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  2. The boat one is an odd coincidence. I just posted a story in which I was adrift alone on the ocean and could hear cruise ships going by with people partying on them. I never dream, though, so all my dream psychology/logic crap has to take place in stories.

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