Strange Dreams

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I understand that the whole COVID social isolation/quarantine thing is having a variety of impacts; mysteriously expanding waistlines, binge viewing of trash TV and all. I, however, am more curious about these strange dreams I have been having. I haven’t come up with a good name to separate them from “weird dreams,” which I have already discussed. These might be a subcategory of weird dreams. Let me explain.

They seem to come in clusters, or bunches. Sort of one after the other. I don’t think I actually wake up between episodes - but I am semi-cognizant of one dream ending and another beginning. I would call them episodic dreams, except that implies that, like a tv series, the dreams were related, same characters, same dominant themes, etc. That is not the case. The content of each of the dreams seem unrelated. Also, the dreams are short. Shorter than short stories, more like little vignettes clipped from a longer narrative. But, as I said, I am left with no clue as to the nature or content of that larger narrative. No doubt I could get a better grasp on this phenomenon were I better able to remember the content of the dreams. I know, I know.  You are supposed to keep a dream journal and, immediately post-dream, write down whatever you can about your dream. However, and this is one of the “strange” bits, while I don’t think I fully wake up between the dreams, I am aware on some level that I am dreaming, and given my current issues with “sleep problems” - which I may have inherited from my older daughter and her older daughter, if that is possible - I am loathe to sacrifice precious sleep to come fully awake and write in a dream journal. So I don’t. My sister and her husband have these watches that track your sleep and show you a graphic representation of waking, sleeping, good sleep, bad sleep, etc. I suppose I could get one, but I’m afraid my graph would look like a pepperoni pizza.

Anyhow, the strangest thing about these mini-dreams is their nebulous relationship to my waking life. I assume we all have repeating categories of dreams that we recognize. In my world of the university, my colleagues often report “dissertation dreams,” in which it is discovered that we never actually finished the damn thing and are summarily either shorn of tenure or dismissed. I have one, perhaps related, in which I am trying to find a location at a convention where I am supposed to deliver a paper. I rush frantically around a huge convention venue with malfunctioning elevators often packed with friends or antagonists from my professional life. They may aid me in my search or lead me astray. I wake from these “genre dreams” exhausted. 

A confusing aspect of the dreams of current concern - mini, cluster, bunch, I still don’t know - is that they have no obvious relationship to either my real world or my “ordinary” dreamworld. Characters, plots, assumed relationships, are all utterly alien, yet seem somehow natural and appropriate. I am toying with the notion that I am pulling the content of these dreams from “somewhere else.” A couple of equally “strange” somewheres suggest themselves. The “many worlds” piece of quantum mechanics posits the notion that whenever we make a significant choice in our lives; career, spouse, location, etc., the alternate worlds that would have resulted from alternate choices go spinning off in other realities - many worlds. Maybe the stuff of these strange dreams is being drawn from those alternate realities. Another idea is one that Buckminster Fuller champions in the introduction to Expanded Cinema by Robert Spahr  (1960) - world-around womb land. This “place” is a sort of universal psychic space that can be accessed by us all, not just the fetal residents of “womb land", would we but pay attention to acquiring the metaphysical skills required, most of which, he seems to imply, are centered in meditation. So, “leakage” from world-around womb land would seem another candidate for the source of these “strange dreams.”

This is the place in a really good essay where the author would pull the various points together into a wise and insightful conclusion. And I would if I could, but I can’t. I guess I just wanted to share, and perhaps inquire as to possibility that you too might be experiencing these strange dreams? But here’s a concluding thought. If I am correct in assuming that these strange dreams are being pulled from “somewhere else,” and if Fuller is right in asserting that meditation plays a significant role in accessing that “other space,” and if the new strange reality of social isolation and self-quarantine brought on by Covid, draws us into spaces more usually accessed via meditation, then maybe the label I am searching for is “Covid dreams.”

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