Monday, January 02, 2006

MY DREAM TENDENCIES

I have always been fascinated by dreams. I don't believe my dreams during adulthood have been particularly outstanding in any way. My dreams are usually enjoyable, and I find I can recall quite a bit about them. The unpleasant ones tend to include what I would imagine are some fairly common themes for many adults...

In one category of my unpleasant dreams I am still in college and I realize I am taking a class I have completely forgotten about and have not been to since the first week of the term, and now there are only a few weeks left in the term and of course I'm getting an F that is probably by now irreperable, and it's too late in the term to drop the class, so I'll end up with the F on my transcript. I will agonize about it for a while, but usually not too long before I find myself wandering around campus and visiting with people.

Another category into which I can lump my not-as-enjoyable dreams include the occasional ones in which I suddenly realize I'm nude in public. With those, I have gotten to where in my dreams I don't find that so alarming and to where it has become more of an irritant. It's kind of like "Aw, not this again!" and then I just slink to wherever I can find some clothes. Sometimes I'll be riding a bike through town, but at least that's a little better than having to walk through a crowd because on the bike I can get home to my clothing much more quickly.

However, I don't tend to have dreams like the aforementioned kind very often. My dreams are usually pleasant. Lately they have been about travel... strange, beautiful landscapes, and lots of images of maps in road atlases, with the maps merging with actual scenery and topography. Very weird, but enjoyable. It seems like the places to which I travel usually involve lots of mountains and river valleys, and sometimes I get the impression of being in western Montana, and particularly in the western 2/3 of Wyoming.

I also have dreams about playing basketball, often in situations where the games are played in old, small, moldy gyms that seem representative of some typical little rural school somewhere in NE Oregon. In some of those dreams I am an adult, in uniform, dominating the inside game against kids who must be 7th or 8th graders, or maybe even grade schoolers. I figure that's probably the level to which my basketball skills have deteriorated, but I don't really mind, because I dominate and have fun. In other dreams, the games are part of a tournament, they take place in larger, more modern gyms, and my teammates are all adults. In nearly all of these cases, I am not a dominant player but my knees don't hurt anymore and I can run up and down the court with ease, occasionally hitting a nice jump shot.

The best one of the basketball dreams was a recent one in which I was going to be playing in a church league, and one of my teammates was the baseball player Ken Griffey, Jr. He and I were late for the first team meeting because we had to attend some kind of small dinner with friends. At the dinner he looked great in a dark, tailored suit with white dress shirt and red tie, and I was dressed in sweats... kind of embarrassing. He and I were joking while the rest of the dinner party discussed other things. Ken kept looking at his watch, and muttering that if we didn't get to the meeting they might not let us be on the team. I don't know what happened after that, but I like to think we made the meeting, got on the team, and dominated! Heh...

Once in a while there will be a dream about performing music live, and in those dreams I am often a recording artist, usually playing "unplugged" style in a small concert hall, with a band. In those dreams I will usually be seated at a piano, but sometimes I will be playing guitars.

Anyway, I would guess the hoop dreams and travel dreams each happen about once a week, and they are always fun. Lots better than those other ones I occasionally have, which are centered around anxiety. And what might be best of all is that I can't recall having any recent dreams about politics, or religion, or about a horrifying future. And oddly, in dreams where I fall, I nearly always end up getting up after falling, and walking away like it was nothing.

You can go ahead and analyze the above if you like, or share some of yours if you'd like... I probably won't analyze yours, unless you tend to have dreams in which you are a serial killer, a bank robber, a politician, etc.

4 Comments:

Blogger Jim Marquis said...

I have that college dream every so often. Maybe the stress of college scarred our pysyches or something...

9:21 PM  
Blogger Snave said...

Yeah, it's kind of like I see the map but it isn't as much a map as it might be a view from above. Of course I've always been obsessed with maps and landscapes, so it seems natural the two would be in my dreams fairly often... I'm just glad that they appear in this format!

12:00 PM  
Blogger Damien said...

I wonder if anyone has devoted a blog to their dreams - hell I bet theres millions of them.

2:08 PM  
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4:32 AM  

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