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| The Knight's Dream, Antonio de Pereda. (Wiki.) |
Zach Neal
Something very strange has been happening lately.
It’s like I go to bed, and as soon as I put the book
down, turn out the light, and close my eyes, the pictures start up in my head.
They’re very clear. Faces, places, buildings and
vehicles, cities and towns, and they’re all unfamiliar—I’ve never laid eyes on
them in my life.
The dreams
can be pretty disjointed. I can’t make heads or tails of what’s going on from
one scene to the next, although the individual scenes have a certain
coherence—a man’s face materializing out of a sandy beach, me crashing an
exotic car through someone’s terrarium…just weird shit that really doesn’t make
much sense. How the hell you get from one scene to the next is a mysterious process
of association at some subliminal level.
We all dream, and in the past, I’ve kept a note-pad
beside the bed. I’ve written dreams down and tried to write them up as a kind
of bizarro fiction.
There is such a thing as directed dreaming, but I have no idea of what to
try—or at least that’s what I’m telling myself.
It’s very strange to know that you are wide awake, and
still to be essentially dreaming, for at its best I have no control over the
pictures that I see.
This lucid dreaming state is a
new one for me—who knows, maybe it’s the change of life, or just winter, or
maybe lack of mental stimulation. This is a real enough prospect, when one’s
life revolves around the computer and you’re spending an average of twenty-two
and a half hours a day indoors. It is winter, after all.
I still dream the old-fashioned way. I wake up, barely
remembering what I was just seeing and doing. The other day there were even a
few bits of dialogue. I spoke, which seems unusual for me. I have no idea what
I said—I probably asked the next poor bastard what was going on.
The fact that I can make it through the day sort of
implies that I’m getting enough sleep.
I can’t help thinking that it serves some kind of
purpose, biological, psychological, or less likely, spiritual.
The thing there
is, that I really don’t believe in magic. (Telepathy, maybe. But not magic.)
If I could direct my dreams tonight, I would set them
on some sort of problem-solving
routine.
Or perhaps I am missing the point of dreaming at all—maybe
it’s just a kind of
mental gymnastics. Maybe there’s some deep and fundamental level of cognitive dissonance.
If so, I have no idea of what it might be…do I hold mutually-contradictory
beliefs? Probably. I suspect we all do—
More likely, my brain is at play and maybe that’s just
healthy and normal.
Maybe it just needs to stretch its legs. Maybe it’s
hungry, maybe it just wants to go somewhere—anywhere.
There are times when I wish I knew what it wanted.
There are times when I wish my subconscious would tell
me what to do, although I have a funny feeling it does anyways—my stomach tells
me when I’m hungry and not the other way around, after all.
I wouldn’t mind knowing what the next scene in my book
should be, for surely I would write that down and take a look at it.
END
