No matter that my feet, bottom and hands had all been lazily dripping in and out of the water for however long I'd been in it, and that'd surely since touched my face: the idea of my head plunging into the water was unbearable. Needless to say, the flailing did not help, and I fell into the water anyway. That was the end of the dream. It seems flailing wasn't the right response. But how did I get there in the first place?
I've been having a lot of bad dreams, or perhaps nightmares, lately. I'd say every two to three nights or so, I have a night of sleep from which I do NOT wake up recalling a bad dream. Apparently I am not alone in this. I heard a sleep expert speak on one of the daily news podcasts I listen to, and she noted that research has been showing quite the uptick in nightmares.
Some of this may have to do with the poor habit I've tried not to develop, but have anyway, of reading a little news before I go to bed. I've been trying to contain my news intake to certain sources and certain times, but sometimes I'm just not successful with that. Perhaps some of what I read before going to sleep seeps into my subconscious and manifests in fucking weird shit in my head.
I suppose the pool example wouldn't so much qualify to me as "fucking weird," maybe just disturbing. There HAS been some "fucking weird shit," but I honestly cannot remember what it was. I think I've maybe blocked a lot of it out. I know a couple days ago I had one surrounding prom, from which I woke up and asked Kris to prom. He said yes.
Maybe it's just felt like I sense of control for me to try and interpret my dreams. I've been looking for metaphors everywhere these days, sometimes consciously. Yesterday, Kris and I went for our daily evening walk and got caught in a downpour. We'd been walking for maybe 45 minutes when it hit, quick and increasing in intensity, until it began to ramp down and then all-together disappeared. The rain lasted for about 20 minutes, and by the end of it, we had about another 15 minutes to walk to get to our house. That trajectory sure felt like the pacing of a novel: development and ramp-up for the first two-thirds or so, climax of conflict, the ramp down and conclusion.
When we were caught in the rain, I turned to Kris and said "Maybe this is a metaphor." It wasn't Pina Coladas and then getting caught in the rain, it was a downpour we didn't see coming (we meaning him and I, our federal government excluded), a rainstorm we had to weather in order for things to balance out on the other side. It feels worth mentioning that while continuing our walk to our story's conclusion - home - it took awhile to dry off.
Here's some weird shit: Zombies. I love zombie movies. I hate blood and guts and horror in general, but for some reason can suspend that for zombies. I love all the metaphor possibilities embedded within a zombie storyline. This morning, while out for my walk to start the day, I didn't see another person or a moving car for maybe 15 minutes, a highly unusual thing for my neighborhood at 7:30am on a Monday morning. There is usually a plethora of folks walking their dogs, kids waiting for the bus, cars driving by on their way to work. When I realized I hadn't seen another person yet, I was right in the middle of a usually busy street.
I stared up into the sky, and then up and down at the parked cars, starting to think that maybe there had been a warning to stay inside completely. Thinking maybe there had been a warning issued that neighborhoods were going to be sprayed, from helicopters, with some sort of agent that would knock out the virus on all surfaces outside.
What if I got caught in it? What if being caught in it meant turning into a zombie of some kind? What if people had already been caught in it, and the next person I encounter tries to eat my face?! Typing that last sentence made me laugh out loud, and the couple previous sentences kinda made me want to try my hand at writing some fiction . . . then I got my wits about me :)
As "fucking weird" as that little tangent might have sounded (or maybe it didn't - zombies are super pop-culture these days, and I admit I wasn't really exposed to the genre until relatively recently), there are things to be said - metaphors to be imagined - for the fact that my quiet street elicited thoughts of zombies for me this morning.
Another anecdote from a walk: yesterday, about 30 minutes into ours, Kris and I came through a wooded, swampy section of Roseville that was absolutely croaking with frogs. There must have been hundreds of them. It harked me back to falling asleep in my room at my parents house. I found the sound of frogs lulling me to sleep so comforting, and still do. I miss it. It was an utter joy to walk through that section of swampy woods, hearing so many frogs singing out. It made me want to pick up our house and drop it right there, just so I could fall asleep to the sound of frogs again regularly.
I'm not quite sure how frogs tie into this "dream-metaphor" post. Perhaps it's a bit of an opposite to the scenarios that have been scaring me in my sleep: it was a waking moment that felt dreamily happy. A reminder of sleep that was completely comfortable, that felt totally safe. Perhaps it was a reminder of how much I'm craving that right now, knowing that I'm likely to wake up feeling a little scared.
This morning, I woke to the sound of rain coming down the drains on the sides of our house. My house. I have started to develop a sense of comfort and security in that sound too. A sense of happy familiarity. I couldn't remember if I'd had any bad dreams, and I didn't try to hard to do so. Hearing the rain made me want to get up and get out, letting the rain drop down onto me and wash away anything that might not need to cling onto to my skin.
That's a metaphor.
No comments:
Post a Comment