… zzz … zzz … zzz … zzz … zzz … zzz … zzz … zzz …. zzz … zzz ..
A couple of nights ago, I went to a ‘workshop’ on dreams.
We sat round in a circle and exchanged dreams.
This was a problem because the reason I am interested in dreams is that I never remember mine.
Maybe once every eight months or so I wake up and remember one. But it is rare. Which I told the other people at the workshop. It cannot have been good news.
I think I am interested in the surreality of dreams because I never took psychedelic drugs. As I have mentioned before in this blog, the only drugs which ever appealed to me were LSD and heroin. Neither was available to me when I might have taken them.
By the time LSD was available to me, I had met and read about too many acid casualties to take it – I thought it might tip me over some psychological edge. And, for me, heroin is a bit like suicide: you would have to be in the right mood to start it and moods pass.
Max Ernst’s L’Ange du Foyer ou le Triomphe du Surréalisme
The only two dreams I have ever remembered properly were nightmares rather than dreams.
Around puberty, I had a recurring dream with a rhythmic, repetitive, increasingly-loud droning sound and there was a box which I knew I should not open but which I felt compelled by the rising, droning sound to open. I never opened it but, each time I dreamed the dream, I got more and more frightened by the rising droning sound until I woke up.
It was some sort of puberty fear dream triggered, I guessed, by the droning sound of a plane flying overhead during the night. Except I don’t think there were any planes flying overhead at night.
In the other dream I remember – and which woke me up with fear – I was me but also someone else and I was running across a flat, open grassy area lit by street lights outside a house at night-time, being chased by a man with a knife who caught me and then killed me. The killing was very physically detailed and vivid.
The LA Times reports the Manson trial
Around a week later, I read very belatedly about the Charles Manson killings in Los Angeles and that was eerie, because I calculated I had had the dream around the same night the killings took place.
Except, of course, that I don’t think any of the victims were killed outside… and the UK is seven or eight hours ahead of Los Angeles, so a night-time killing in LA would happen when it was daylight morning in the UK.
So linking the two was a fantasy layered on top of a nightmare.
Inevitably, having said I don’t remember my dreams, I woke up this morning and remembered a dream. But only part of one.
And now I have forgotten it except that it had something to do with me having a dream (within my dream) of writing a blog about dreams when I woke up in the morning.
That is true.
I think.
SO IT GOES - John Fleming's blog 