Someone else's dreams

"And so Iggy Pop started cutting himself on stage, and the blood ran down into the mud of the mosh pit and everyone started scooping it up to drink like a sacrament!" I'm one of those people who bores his close friends with stories about my dreams. I think my dreams are sometimes entertaining and sometimes help me to have insights into myself. I truly think that sometimes my subconscious works things out in dreams that I can't work out in real life. I've paid a lot of attention to my dreams over time and I think I know as much about dreams as anyone.

I've had dreams where I was sleeping and dreaming a different dream inside the dream. I've even done some semi-lucid dreaming, where you partially wake up inside the dream and start controlling what happens.

There are common events and locations in my dreams. There's the school dreams, of course, now largely unattached from any actual physical school I've attended. I used to dream the standard about starting a class but not being able to find the room until the end of the semester. I went semi-lucid in one of those and decided, to heck with it, I can just make it up next semester. Now I dream about graduation coming up and I've deferred so many failed classes that I'm not going to graduate.

Sometimes at school while I worry about graduating a big hippie gypsy carnival parade comes through. When that happens, the school starts to look medieval, like Mont St. Michel.

There's the big city street, usually my friend Susan from the big city accompanies me there. There's the restaurant, usually the restaurant where I worked through most of my teens. I go back there and they agree to let me work a shift as a busboy for old times' sake. I fall steadily behind and end up in disgrace.

There's the café by the beach above the pier. There's a walking pier not far from there, lined with shops. There's the backstreets of the town where the Mexican carnival is going on. There's the giant Chinatown mall, usually I go there after dark when it's mostly empty. There's the shops above that where I can never find that one Mexican restaurant again.

There's the downtown area where I can never find that one nightclub again. There's a different nightclub made of thick adobe painted very pale yellow where they serve dinner upstairs and have great music shows in the basement. There's the huge steep bridge, so steep that it terrifies me just to climb it, but it always works out fine.

For a long time I had a repeating dream where I was hitchhiking up the coast with some friends, but we got separated in the rain. I always ended up bedraggled, muddy, and wet, knocking on the door of this mansion to ask for some help. It's the Reagan's. Ron and Nancy would take me in and they were surprisingly kind. After dinner we'd sit in the living room looking out the giant pictures windows over the ocean while the storm got worse and worse until giant waves were crashing over the house. I had that dream many times during the eighties. It's my only really Freudian dream.

I even have theories about dreaming. I think that the reason dreams seem so, well, dreamlike is that your mind is like a bad animation artist. It just can't keep foreground and background in synch. You zoom your attention into something, bring it to the foreground, and tell yourself a little story about it.

Like with the restaurant dreams, I zoom in and watch myself clearing a table. I do ok, but my attention is fairly splintered. When I zoom back out, I have to recreate the background and I may not do it in proper synch with the time sense of the "close up". Or, I might draw the background entirely differently. I might put in a giraffe. Or move entirely to the jungle. Then, why am I clearing tables in the jungle? Why are things in absurd combinations?

Or you go from A to B to C, like gardening makes you think of water hose which makes you think of elephant. Then you compare A to C and think, "why is there an elephant in my gardent?"

I believe it's all because of the nature of paying attention to something in a dream.

All this is to explain why I'm so upset about last night's dreams. You understand by now: I take my dreams seriously. I know my dreams, I know the shape and flavor of them. And I know when I'm having someone else's dreams.

Last night I had a dream that had nothing at all to do with me. I was watching it like a movie. It involved a couple who shifted unsettling between being Asian and African. Sometimes they were Koreans in Singapore, sometimes they were from neighboring villages in Africa. They were at an airport, getting on a small prop plane. They argued about their sugar importing business. I sat in neighboring seats and listen.

This is not part of my dream world. I do not know these people.

It's probably the new psych medicine, the Buspar. I'll let it go for awhile, and see what I can learn about this new land. I like using the medications to manage my head, and it will probably settle out soon.

But it brings out the biggest fear I always have with psych medicines, the fear that I will no longer be myself. When do you cross the line? When do you become somebody else?

I'm the only me I've got.