Falling Awake

It is dichotomy. I should be quite clear about that right here at the beginning.  “Falling asleep,” going from consciousness to “un-,”  is very often difficult for me. I wish it were not so. “Falling awake,” leaving my dreamworld and returning to waking, is often relentless and able to resist all my conscious efforts to remain asleep. There, now I think we can go on.

Sleeping has always been one of my favorite activities. Well, OK,  it isn’t really the sleeping that I find entertaining, it is the dreaming. The places you go, the people you meet, the adventures you have! - It is all just amazing! Still, I imagine there are probably as may different different explanations and interpretations of dreams as there are dreamers.  Freud got his hand in early, so a fair number of folks followed the leads he set forth in his landmark book The Interpretation of Dreams, back in 1899.  The read is a bit of a slough. I have a kind of War and Peace relationship with it.  Meaning I distinctly remember starting it several times, but have no clear memory of ever having finished it. Still, I have read about it so often that the illusion that I actually read it could easily have crept in. But that is really beside the point since whatever I “know” about Freud’s take on dreams, read or imagined, doesn’t really align with mine. His seems a little too open to idiosyncratic interpretation.

For example, the guy who originally hired me at NC State back in 1980 was a sweetheart of a guy.  Great big guy, an ex-football player,  played offensive line in college. We would have faculty meetings at his house, after all there were only 8 or 9 of us.  The meetings took place mostly in the kitchen where he would serve homemade pasta with fantastic sauce. His wife was equally welcoming and an amazingly talented watercolorist. Sadly, he died relatively young, and yeah, the idea of pasta and football does come to mind. But that is not the point. 

I mentioned that his wife, Annette, was an excellent artist. Well, she was also one in the arts community who did more than her part to put the “New” in “New Age.”  One manifestation of this mindset was her report that she knew that whenever she dreamed of red meat, she was really dreaming about her deceased husband, who had a message for her. No doubt Freud could get great mileage out of this dream. I could not, and I mention it primarily to discourage you from letting Freud creep into our current look at my affection for dreams.  So let me offer some insights into the dreamworld that I find so attractive.

First, life in my dreamworld is almost always new and unique.  I rarely, if ever, dream about anybody that I actually know. There are people in my dreams, obviously people who are precious to me, and who are tightly woven into my life. But their faces are rather indistinct. Sort of my life before lasik. Upon waking I will try to recall who was in the dream. Maybe her? Maybe him? A bit of frustration here as I often wake, as I’m sure many of us do, just prior to some major reveal in the dream plot.

The uncertainty continues through a consideration of locale.  I do occasionally dream about specific places where I have lived.  And a  recurring locus seems to be meetings in large hotels or conference centers where our professional conferences were held. Not a specific one, but locales in that genre.  Often I am lost.  Yeah, yeah I know, why not be lost if I’ve never been here before.  Still, I am supposed to go somewhere to meet someone or deliver a paper. But I’m not exactly sure who, or where or when. Interestingly, I am not stressed as I wander, lost, through these large venues. I would be in “real life.” But these spaces often unfold in scenic places. Interestingly, Venice gets a lot of “recognizable attention,” as do some other pleasant, but unknown, locales. I need to point out that my dreams are, with only a few rare exceptions, pleasant, fun, and fulfilling. And I think that is central to why I object to “falling awake.”  It seems especially unfair as I often have such trouble “falling asleep.”

Recently I have been encountering a new genre of dreams. I call them “flash dreams.”  They seem to occur rather exclusively after napping, before returning to the obligations and activities that may have been instrumental in my declaring: It’s nap time!  Anyhow, it feels like they cram an incredible amount of content into a very short period of semiconscious time, mere seconds to spin out most of a normal “dream script.”  Furthermore they can occur sequentially - that is really the wrong word. Sequentially might be taken to mean that each dream would be narratively related to the dreams that preceded and followed it.  That isn’t really the case.  “Flash dreams,” as I conceive of them, can “flash” by quickly, back-to-back-to-back-to-back one right after another, but seemingly having no narrative relationship to one another. Though I suppose a Freudian could finagle one out of them. 

Perhaps I ought to be hooked up to an EEG machine before claiming these various characteristics for a phenomenon that may be unique to me.  Yet, the experiences of these “flash dreams” are, to date, unfailing positive, and in one recent example, incredibly long-lived. I believe I have mentioned that, by and large, I do not remember dreams unless I can recount them to someone soon after waking, and even then I am not sure if I am remembering the dream itself or my initial reporting of it.

Anyway in a recent “flash dream” - days ago and I still remember it! - I was running along a path in the Glen Helen Nature Preserve in Yellow Springs, Ohio, a place I used to hang out in my high school days. [Do drop me a line if you know where I am talking about, because you would have to be someone I would be delighted to hear from!].  So, like I said, I’m running along a path in Glen Helen. I can hear the rush of the water fall that I know is just up around the bend. It is screened now by lush summer growth thick enough to muffle bird calls and turn the afternoon daylight to a dappled green. I will come out in the thickets above the falls where I can soften my tread and peek out and see if I am alone. I may have heard voices. I arrive in the thicket, the falls are louder now. I reach out to part the branches and — the dream ends.

Ordinarily I would find this an act of neurological high treason. How could my brain do that to me!?  But for some reason flash dreams end more gently, as though they too seek to Foster Harmony and Enable Beauty.  Flash dreams end like the finale of a fireworks display. They light up the sky for a glorious moment of sight and sound, only to then fade slowly out, carving pastel trails down into black velvet.