While there are themes that are consistent in all of my dreams (a hectic need to save...something, impossibly complex world scenes, familiar faces, etc.), I sometimes have a single dream that changes its face multiple times. A transition will come out of nowhere and it will usually make absolutely no sense in retrospect, even though it seems perfectly normal to be in one instance trying to snipe a polar bear from half a mile a way with a bow and arrow and then in the next to be sitting in a cylindrical stadium eating pizza with my dad.
The dream that I had last night was one of these, that I will from now on call a "kaleidescope dream." It might be a bit confusing but I will try to get down exactly what I experienced because it was hugely entertaining, exciting and visually stunning. When I woke up this morning, I tried to translate what I experienced into words and, even though a second before I could remember vividly what had happened, the process of translating dream language into spoken language made some of the fragile memory flee. The following is what is left of that memory; each time I tell it, it becomes more and more concrete in my mind as the only thing that happened, but every word has ten more to help describe it, and they have been lost to the dream haze.
The first phase of the dream took place in my own room. I can remember the thick blue carpet very vividly. I just finished watching Lost a few days ago so I think that the inspiration for this part came from how invested I have been in the show and how often I have been thinking about it because, in my room running around my carpet, was the Man in Black who had taken the form of a large spider. I remember thinking, "he can take any form he wants and a small, nothing-more-than-creepy spider is the answer?" I quickly dealt with the first threat of the dream by smashing the spider with the heel of my shoe.
With no transition, my small alert level moved its focus to an island. Here is where I have lost the most memory because I know the feeling of what happened there better than I know the order or even the content of events; it is close to impossible to describe it with the limitations of language.
I left the island somehow and found myself in a grocery store with my girlfriend, a kid I went to highschool with and my Abnormal Psychology professor, among the three most random people I could have pulled together from the depths of my subconscious. The three of us walked through the store without an objective, until the guy I went to highschool with tossed me a baseball and told me it was a gift. With the baseball in hand, I picked up a box from a shelf that was supposed to somehow go with the baseball. At this point I had no idea what the connection was between the ball and the box, and I was inspecting the material when a little girl came out of nowhere and stole the box from my hand. I chased her with urgent need, flying between shelves and aisles that were crowded with people, chasing the girl who was quicker than I as she darted between the obstacles. When I began to cover the distance between us, I saw her place the box on the shelf again and continue running with the intention that I would continue following her. I considered myself lucky and was proud that I had not let her get away with this and I picked up my trophy to inspect it. The box was meant to be cut out and, with a rubber band, was to be made into a slingshot for the ball. Even in my dream, I thought this was the dumbest thing I had ever seen.
I eventually found the other three and went to leave with them but found that in my haste to chase the little girl, I had dropped all of my things where I had been standing. My sweatshirt and jacket were on the floor right where I had left them but they were unexpectedly next to a laptop computer, a cold tea cup, and other objects that I cannot quite make out from my memory. I tried, with very limited physical coordination to pile all of the object into my arms, assuming that they were my psych professor's. Even in the dream, I was confused as to why on earth she had been dumb enough to leave her things on the ground like that, expecting me to pick them up and bring them back to her.
As I walked toward the exit of the store, the aisles became dark and were blocked off by a chain-link fence. I became more and more cautious and aware of my surroundings as my earlier objective of safely leaving with my arms full melted into the recesses of the haze. It was as if my mind had wandered and the distraction alone was itself enough to change my surroundings; as if I had been reading and something in the text had prompted my mind to take another path and, staring away from the pages out the window, my surroundings became the home of my new thought. While I have much less utility in the dream world, I can access so much more because my mind is more powerful than my body.
The dark aisle became suddenly filled with violent, chaotic noise that I soon perceived to be the result of a deadly fight. I found the enemies (one who I now think looked strangely like LeVar Burton) and made a decision as to who was bad and who was good. I grabbed the arm of the one man and bent it behind a column while LeVar incapacitated him. The wall of the room had now incorporated a driveway into its makeup that retreated outdoors and the unconscious man slumped down to rest in the middle of it. LeVar, meanwhile, laid down across the gravel and the door to the room began to close. From where I was, I couldn't tell on which side of him the door would close and watched nervously as the scene outside turned to the scene of civil unrest. My gaze returned to the prostrate man as he was locked outside the room, condemned to the dangerous war scene.
I became him. His problems were my problems. I was not Matt Morgan, I was not Fake LeVar Burton. I was no one and remained defined by my objective that was as ambiguous as my identity. I hopped in a taxi that was being driven by a large, serious man who nonetheless asked me my name as I got into his car. Connor suddenly was there next to me, and I thought this was as normal as if he had been there all along. When asked our names, we responded and redirected the question, to which the answer was: "I will scramble my name and only tell you if you are correct when you try to unscramble it: my name is CAMERON EITHER NOVEMBER." The two of us sat in the back and thought seriously about this as we drove out of the dangerous city and into the countryside of rolling green hills toward a destination that was yet undetermined by my indecisive brain.
The scrambled name was vivid to me in the dream. I have had very few instances in dreams where I have actually read words or seen numbers. If I have the time, I will try to include in this blog the other dreams. They were less vivid but more solid than this one that I am still trying to wrap my head around. With the semantics of conscious reason, I am sure that there is a story hidden amongst the wild and random scenarios that I experienced. But in trying to connect them, I risk losing the crazy uniqueness of a dream.
