For whatever reasons, and I'm sure there are several, I have not been sleeping well of late. I toss and turn and generally get about 3-5 hours of sleep a night. However, the times when I have actually fallen asleep have been filled with dreams that would make Dali wet his pants. The dreams don't include melting clocks or things of that nature, but they have a unique surrealism that may only apply to my own twisted subconscious. I have to wonder where some of these images come from. Are they a product of my youthful psychadelic experimentation? Are they metaphors, albeit very strange metaphors, for my life? Am I simply going mad?
The dream I had last night is about me as a cadet at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. This is odd in its own right given the fact that I've never been in the military or to Annapolis. The other thing that adds to the surreal nature of the dream was that, despite this being the Naval Academy, no one, with the exception of a lone MP in a Humvee, was in uniform. The dormitory was a five story steel and glass structure that would never grace the stately, hallowed grounds of Annapolis in a million years. The place looked more like a shopping mall than any thing else. Also, there were a lot of cats.
Most of the dream consisted of me running around in my underwear desperately trying to find my dorm room so I could be on time for roll call or class or whatever. Despite this constant state of unreadiness, the only time I got in trouble was when I showed up at inspection without a deck of playing cards. Apparently, had I read the Naval Handbook, I would have known that all cadets are required to possess a deck of cards at all times. Who knew? A deck of cards? I had to do twenty push-ups. The fact that I could actually DO the twenty push-ups only added to the weirdness. Anyway, I woke up at a part of the dream where I was in the library, perched upon a really tall ladder, reading a book with a large, grey cat on my lap.
Another fine example of my twisted subconscious state came a couple of weeks ago. The scene was walking around a place that could have been New York, Seoul, Paris, San Francisco, or a combination of the bunch waiting for a Patti Smith concert to start. In the dream it's a very nice day, the sun is shining, and there are a lot of people milling about. The weirdness starts when I run into two of my friends, Chip and Glenn (Mannerin, for those who know who I'm talking about), who are both on their way to the show. Not an especially weird moment until you realize that they are both dressed in the most fashionable Glam-rocker/cowboy chic (think Clint Eastwood meets Poison meets Stevie Ray Vaughan and you might get the picture). Those of you who know Glenn and Chip can understand how odd this might seem. Anyway, the three of us chatted for a bit and I wandered off.
Now one thing about my dreams is that I seem to be able to wake up, and even stay up for a while, and then slide right back into the dream when I fall asleep again.
The second part of this dream is in the same setting only now I'm walking into this immense, oval, ballroom with giant, doric columns about every ten feet or so. Between the columns or on the floor of the room are hundreds of nude women covered in bronze body paint posing as ancient Greek or Roman statues in various positions from the zodiac signs to "The Thinker". As I'm wandering through this scene, I bump into my friend Dawn, who is also covered in bronze body paint (even her glasses are bronze) and ask her if she knows where the bathroom is. She points it out, and I wake up ( I had to pee, what can I say).
I've had numerous dreams of this nature in the past few months...well for many years actually (there was the dream in Korea where a former co-worker went around the office smelling eveyone's feet to find out whose were the smelliest!?!). What do these dreams mean? Your guess is as good as mine.
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