About two years ago I decided that I wanted to start a dream journal. My dreams had always been quite peculiar and I found googling the meanings of certain symbols and themes found in dreams absolutely fascinating.
A very funny trend that I had found within my dreams was that I die– a lot. To the point where I got really good at knowing when I was going to die based on what was happening in the dream. Most of these weren’t even in nightmares. I would say that I never really have a nightmare, maybe only one or two within a year but I still die a lot outside those.
My most common death occurred from me just falling to my death. But my favorite way to die, a strange sentence to say, but it’s true I have a favorite. Is getting attacked and either stabbed or concussed. It’s my favorite because it’s the quickest. Falling to your death takes time you wait agonizing in the eternity that is dream time, where a stab is quick and efficient; one and done.
Another incredibly common event is zombies, either in a generic slow moving corpse or a quicker more terrifying undead clown zombie. Perhaps my oldest dream which reoccurred for months involved me running down a long concrete corridor being chased by these zombie clowns. I am stopped by a rge square chasm that houses an entire active circus filled with giraffes and tall dders where even more zombie clowns are waiting to attack. I managed to leap the gap– it always felt like pushing through water while I was in the air. Some of the zombies manage it as well and continue to chase me but they never catch me but that’s likely only because the dream never sted much longer past this point.
My personal favorite common thread between my dreams is that I almost always can fly in some capacity. Usually constrained by the need to have to “swim” to be able to fly so rarely am I able to move quickly. This ability is sometimes coupled with also being able to jump really high and almost float. Flying becomes incredibly useful especially in the zombie dreams as it provides an easy escape from the threat, at least temporarily.
In more recent years my dreams have slowly shifted from the more fantastical supernatural dreams to more grounded, slightly realistic dreams. I find myself disappointed by this fact as it feels like a loss of my childhood wonder. Dreams are a reflection of the present and with that loss of chaos and amazement in my dreams I can’t help but wonder what is missing in my life– what can I do to bring that back.
When I worked at the Barn theatre st summer I, as well as most of the staff, frequently found ourselves stricken with what we dubbed “Barn Dreams”. Which as the name might imply takes pce at the Barn Theatre. The dreams themselves were typically mundane but they were described to the other staff members almost like horror stories.
See we spent so much time working, typically from 10am-12am every day for months on end that to not even be able to be free from the pce at home in our own thoughts was an absolute nightmare. You would finally leave work after hours only to fall asleep and find yourself right back there working even more. Like it had some sort of fourth dimensional grasp on all of the employees that kept pulling them back into the hellscape of their jobs.
I find the spans of time in which I don’t have dreams boring. The act of falling asleep and then waking up with nothing happening is frankly, dumb. As a writer, dreams are where some of my best ideas come from. Several weeks ago I had a dream which contained a vampire turning me into a vampire(which also TG me) and that inspired me to write Transpirational Love. I like to refer to it as my “Twilight” because funnily enough Twilight was written from a dream Stephenie Meyer had.
