Dreams

I sometimes bemoan the fact that we have one life to live, that we can't have one lifetime then pick ourselves up and transplant into another lifetime.  Books and movies let us have the illusion of the possibility.  Colin Firth can be a painter, a writer, an aristocrat, a pauper father, a king, a gay banker- the list goes on- he can seemingly be and do so many different things regardless of time.   In a movie the character can die, but the actor can show up somewhere else and continue.  If only reality worked this way.

(Design by: desexign)

In some ways I have something that not everyone does, memorable dreams.  It is as if I have two lives to live - one of consciousness and the other unconsciousness or subconscious.  My dreams are in color, vivid, and often full of sensations.  My unconscious brain recreates the five senses, though dormant in my sleeping body, in my dreams.  Not all my dreams are spectacular and not all have every sense, but I have another world in which to live.

Most of my dreams are pleasant, odd and confusing, but pleasant.  I have reoccurring dreams that have been both good and bad.  The first is tornados. Sometimes I face the tornado, I watch it come, knowing that it can't hurt me.  I've been in small broken down houses, skyscrapers, or out in the open when the tornado is bearing down.  I've seen deep green sod and trees seem to burst from the ground, like a bomb went off, as the tornado hits the earth.  I've also dreamt of trying to save people from tornados.  I run through the buildings screaming at people to seek shelter.  I've hunkered down in the basement while the house above begins to rattle.

The other reoccurring element in my dreams are elevators.  The elevators in my dreams never work like a traditional one should.  They never go up and down, at least not solely up and down, and they almost never go to the right place.  I am constantly riding elevators that twist and turn through the building.  I go sideways, backwards, forwards, up, down, in circles. Some have horizontal doors, others vertical.  There is only one dream that I can remember that had an elevator that worked like ones in reality.

With this great world comes some bad experiences.  Usually I don't encounter bad dreams, but after reading 'The Cabinet of Curiosities' I found myself at the mercy of a serial killer.  That dream was tactile and very unpleasant.  I hadn't been expecting it since I'd already moved on to several other books, but I guess the image of what that killer did stuck in my subconscious.  I've also had vivid dreams of my then lover dying.  I hadn't heard from him in weeks and somehow my subconscious translated it as his death.  Once I spoke with him again, the dreams stopped.  So I guess they're not always two separate worlds, but in my dreams I can face feelings I squash in my conscious life.

I have a cache of memories from both realities and both keep me going.  I may not get more that one lifetime, but perhaps I can do as much as possible in my two worlds.