Happy Friday (and Harry Potter movie day), inspiring friends! Guest posts return next week with photography from Naveed Ahmad. For today, let’s talk about dreams.
Jesse Reklaw draws comics based on dreams at slowwave.com
As you may know from reading this blog, I am a prolific and vivid dreamer. I often have (and recall) several dreams in one night, each with its own world and storyline. These range from the epic to the mundane; last night I dreamed about a woman who thought “egg sandwich” meant a hard-boiled egg, in shell, between white bread and Miracle Whip. There are several recurring images and themes in my dreams. I often dream of falling, though never of flying until very recently. I clearly remember one dream in which I fell off the top of a spiral staircase and kept falling, stomach plummeting, until in terror I forced myself to wake up. My dreams frequently deal with vastness of space: wide open areas, great heights, dense forests.
Bird's eye view: My dreams often look like this. Gihachiro Okuyama, Evening Glow at Akaurawan, 1943.
In conversations with friends I’ve often been surprised at the similarities and differences in our dream patterns. Everyone seems to have some version of the “kick” so graphically brought to life in Inception, that moment of collision when something in your dream (and maybe in real life?) jolts you awake. For me it used to be roller-skating on a sidewalk, and I’d trip and wake up out of that half-dreaming state before really falling asleep. But other patterns are less universal. Many of us have had dreams of being chased, of flying, of loved ones dying, of seeing ourselves sleeping, and so forth — but often there are particular images and themes that come back to our subconscious worlds again and again, and that seems to be different for everyone.
Do we all dream differently, or is it just that we tell them — or experience them — differently? If you and I spent a night wandering the same dreamworld, would we wake to remember different things? Perhaps you were one of the nameless faces I passed on my journey. Perhaps the dream that was dangerous to me was placid to you on just the other side of the river.
Tell me about your dreams.
satsumabug.com | Lisa Hsia 
I love the Oprah Winfrey one up top– what a great idea for a comic!
I don’t dream as reliably as did a few years ago because of my intermittent insomnia. When I did dream every night I had some doozies, like being a British reporter during World War ll and running through empty afternoon streets with a soldier looking for a safe hiding place from German spies. (We fell in love before I woke up.)
Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell were in my living room in another dream. She wanted to help me with a problem I was having with my mother. She was very sweet, and wise. Kurt wasn’t mean or anything, but he couldn’t figure out why they were at my house, and he kept pointing to his watch when he thought I wasn’t looking.
In another dream, I bought an old wooden trunk-like box of vintage men’s ties at a yard sale, to see if I could make a skirt or something out of them. When I got the box home and opened it, it was like when anybody looked at the money in “Pulp Fiction” –lots of light, like sunshine, but it felt like I brought home happiness, too. Then everything in my house was bathed in that light and became beautiful, and I noticed that there was a portal leading out of the room to a lush new world, lit warm and deeply dawn or sunset shifted, like a cinematographer would light heaven. I woke up before I got there.
I could go on about dreams forever! And I hate that Inception-like kick! It can happen to me at any time, except when I’m having those scary ‘I just woke up while my body is still in sleep paralysis’ moments! Then I wake up verrry slowwwly. 🙂
I love hearing about your dreams! They’re so interesting and so different from mine. 🙂
My “kick” dreams used to be rollerskating when I was little, too! Or sometimes it was skiing or tripping. But after I had sprained my ankle two or three times, the dream turned into falling onto my ankle. 😛
I have a lot of dreams where I’m running, but everything’s in slow motion. I can only think of one time where I was actually able to run really fast. I also don’t usually remember full dreams (except for extremely vivid ones like the wedding one I’ve told you about, or the Transformers one, or the weird sci-fi android one). Sometimes I’ll have a main dream that’s interrupted by a small dream (like a commercial or something) before continuing. Another thing about my dreams is that I’m often not myself, or I’ll turn into several people before the dream is over. In one dream, I saw some friends carrying a friend up the stairs, and then suddenly I was the one being carried up the stairs! It happens a lot, and makes the storytelling a little more complicated haha
I’ve had nightmares that I wake up from because of terror (I once had a dream that I died, and there was absolute nothingness afterward. It was a terrible feeling.), and I’ve had nightmares that I’ve woken up from because I physically reacted to them (Mommy and I were chasing a spider and it flew at me… I woke up because I was trying to scuttle off of the bed). I also have a nightmare from childhood that still comes to me every once in a while, and that I always jerk awake from in complete panic. I can’t even really tell you what it is, because it’s pretty foggy even to me, but there’s always an image of amorphous blobs changing and rearranging into each other. When I think about it in waking, it’s not terrifying at all, but it’s definitely the dream that scares me the most.
I’ve had a buuunch of dreams that start with me running from something upstairs in the parents’ house, and because I can’t run fast enough to get away, I end up jumping down our entire flight of stairs. In these dreams, it’s always nighttime, and everything is a dark blue. I wake up because the ground is coming closer and closer and I really don’t want to feel the impact.
Eee, thank you for writing. 😀 Falling-onto-ankle “kick” dreams sound very unpleasant. 😦
I’ve had dreams about being multiple people too, though after I wake up I can never remember when I was me and when I was someone else. Also I’m never sure whether I’m really me or whether I’m just someone else dreaming in first person. ;b
I’ve had slow-running dreams before, but not lately. Lately I seem to run fairly fast. Interesting. And I jump down flights of stairs too.
My recurring scary dream… well, it’s not exactly a dream, but it’s something that fills my mind when I’m feverish or sleep-deprived… is of things getting bigger and bigger and then smaller and smaller. Particularly my fingers. For some reason this is absolutely horrifying when it’s my fingers.
A recurrent theme in MY dreams is walking with leaden feet. I must get from one place to another place (usually a determined destination) but it’s a humungus effort to get one foot in front of the other….it’s like an invisible force is pulling me back…
Another recurrent theme is sea water…..at times it’s a flood caused by rising tides…..at others it’s an imminent tidal wave…
Once I dreamt I was on a canoe with my oldest school buddies in the middle of a swamp surrounded by misty forest…..on an island full of unknown predators. One by one my friends were picked off and they disappeared, until I was the only one left…
I don’t dream about giving exams at school anymore, thankfully. Those were terrifying because I was always unprepared, couldn’t recall any Math or Physics whatsoever…
The dreams I absolutely loathe are the ones where a close one dies. Once, I dreamt my mother died and I cried and sobbed and there was a vice-like grip around my heart and I woke up in this state thinking it had actually happened. Dreams like this have a way of staying with you all day…
Very disconcerting, yet very interesting in what they symbolise, these dreams….. 🙂
Oooh, heavy feet and seawater. The few times I’ve had dreams about water, they’ve been really vivid and interesting.
When I was in college I had a number of dreams about family members dying. I’d wake up, yes, sobbing and terrified, and would have to call the people in question to tell them to be careful that day!
Sorry to come so late to your party! I just wrote about a dream I recently had. I call it Love Poem.
The woman in the window flutters and burns like a dripping heart.
He appraises from below; his eyes tug at her hair.
“Hello!” He calls, “Here I am!”
She smiles and waves. It is her job to sit here, glowing in the shadows.
“Come down so I we can talk!”
She pauses and looks down. The pages slip from her fingers and fall to his feet.
(Trees shiver and birds freeze in flight while the sun sits poised like a vase on the horizon.)
“I think I love you!” He yells.
She leans out into the sun and her smile is a burst of light that sprays the curtains and spills down the wall.
She tumbles down (through the slicing branches, icy knifing feathers) and lands in a pool of shards at his feet.
He picks up the stained pages and sighs. She had a lovely face.
Late party-comers always welcome! 😉
That’s quite a poem, and so fascinating as a dream. It’s always a challenge for me to translate dreams into writing that isn’t just “and then this happened and this happened and this happened and oh yeah, he was really that other guy!” How faithfully does your poem represent the way the dream felt?