dreamlife

Can't sleep. How many of these entries start that way? I'm not counting it now, but I think a lot. I have to be out the door in three hours and alert enough to care for other people's children. Hmmm. I think I'm so awake because I spent the last four days in a trance. I'm still not sure if it was weather-migraine shit (its possible to go through a full migraine without ever having the headache part) or if I was a bit annemic (I usually eat more meat this time of the month but this week I didn't) or what, but I was sleeping a lot and dreaming heavily and I feel like I just woke up for the first time after dinner tonight at my parents' house.

My dreams, as you probably know, tend to be vivid, memorable, and lucid. They also have a fairly consistant narrative and set of rules within their reality. Like I can fly, but it takes a lot of effort and both physical and mental capacity and I don't do it that often. It's also not very common or normal, though people know that it's possible and I'm not the only one who can. I usually only bother if I'm trying to get somewhere quickly or if it's a much shorter distance up and over than it is around. If I don't like the outcome of something, I can usually declare a rewind and do it again. It's not that time zips backwards, but more like a game of pretend where everybody accepts that I'm doing it over. If I already have something in my hand or am at a particular place, I have to physically put it down or return to the point I want to restart, and everybody has the memory of the failed attempt, but its just accepted that I am, say, starting over at the begining of the raft trip (we had to haul the raft and ourselves back, of course) but this time I'm stopping to make sure I have everything I need packed in a waterproof bag and I know in advance where we have to avoid the destroyer ships. The rules of little kid pretend also apply to most death and fighting things. There are no real guns or swords, but if it would have been a good shot, you have to accept that you've been hit and act accordingly. The flying comes in handy a lot in the fighting dreams, as I can escape and "run" and hide in three dimentions. Sure, they always find me, but then it just turns into a chasing dream.
Time is another thing that's kind of screwy. Within each dream it's very linear and much like awake time, but I can go to sleep any night and show up at any point in my life. I have all the memories and knowledge of now (past dreams, too), but it's not strange for me to be back in Cleveland and working at American Greetings or at Oberlin with my friends in school and me in limbo or even in fifth grade again, but trying to opperate within the world of dream fifth grade with all my adult thoughts and memories.
Those are pretty much the rules.
Settings are consistent from dream to dream, though they don't look like their real counterparts or anywhere I've been. Interlochen has a completely different layout in dream-world and they've even been building a shopping center and a big student center and stuff that will totally change the feel of things. Were I a better artist I could probably draw the dream versions of my current and past apartments. The Cleveland ones (I moved once in Cleveland dreamworld since the first place turned out to be not what I'd expected) were pretty awesome. Oberlin's landscape and town were completely riddiculous.

Then there's the narrative. The same way when you're awake you may remember your dreams but you're aware of what has happened in your awake life, I tend to be aware of everything that's happened in my dream life from dream to dream. They build on eachother. And even when I'm very aware that what's happening is something that often happens in my reoccuring dreams, but I'm pleasantly surprised that it's happening "for real" this time. Or I'll be aware that I'm asleep and dreaming and just know that I have to stick to what's happened within that reality in my dealings with people. [In the dreams] I've been running into a lot of really random people from elementary school lately, including a few I hadn't thought about in at least ten years. Stephanie is now all about being my friend, though these days I'm finding her pretty annoying. Jenn and Leah and I have been friendly again, but it's kind of weird with all the time that passed when we just didn't talk to eachother. Just the other night I saw Michael Depalma, which was particularly odd because in my awakedom I'd pretty much forgotten about his existence. In dream narrative I never actually graduated from high school because I got into college early and it wasn't going to matter once I had my bachelors degree, but since I dropped out of college I have to go back and try to finish up gym and another class or two to get my diploma. I'm not really in a hurry, but it's weird and embarassing to be 23 and back in high school, even though very few people are aware I'm 23. Other recent events within the narrative: my parents informed us while we were completely jet-lagged and trying to adjust to the time change of our trip to Paris that they were having a trial separation. I was very pissed off at the way they told us and freaked out because I've always based my belief in True Love on how much they adore eachother. They insisted that it wasn't for lack of love but because they were just too completely annoyed with eachother, but really they were just being assholes about it. On the brighter side of dream-world, I met this guy at a retreat and we're like a couple of puppies together and things are going really well so far. In my dreams I've been a counselor at Interlochen for a few summers and there's been an ongoing problem finding me a position that will accomodate me having the dog. We tried a few cabins with outside areas and tried letting Freud run around but it looks like I'm going to be in one of the art huts or by the lake and Ian (another person I hadn't thought of in ages...in reality he was the Great Love of my Five Minutes at Interlochen 1997) is back to be a counselor.

I'm tempted to delete all this because I'm a bit afraid it's too big a window into my crazies, but maybe it's verbose and strange enough that no one will read it and I can feel proud of myself for putting it all out there.