A boating dream

It seems that returning to a healthy sleep pattern and regular dreaming (regular dreaming being an important part of healthy sleep, in my humble opinion) is taking longer than I thought it would. But the impact of that early-mid February interruption will fade with the passing of time, I’m sure. And all will eventually return to normal.

Since returning to San Antonio I’ve been having a number of dreams that involve actual, living people whom I know in real life. And you do remember my policy in that regard, don’t you? Those are dreams about which I do not post out of respect for the privacy of others.

Last night, however, I had a “safe” dream: one I can write about.

In my dream…

…there was a lot of water, and me in a boat with other people having fun. This is rather odd because I’ve actually spent very little time, ever, on boats. I’ve never owned one, never been on a cruise, and have never been one to spend recreational time on boats. While I have enjoyed the hobby of fishing at different times in my life, I’ve either fished from piers or from the shore – pretty much always.

But in my first sleep of the night (which is not the one that usually brings me dreams, by the way) I was a passenger with unidentified friends on a respectably sized motor boat taking part in some sort of regatta on Lake Michigan. The boat in which I was riding was one of several traveling in a rather large circle, and there were folks riding jet-skis zooming around us and amongst us.

This was all taking place on a bright, sunny afternoon. Everyone was laughing and having a good time.

I have absolutely no idea where this happy dream came from nor why I had it. But I liked it.

Happiness is a precious commodity and one to be treasured, both in real life and in dreams.

Who WAS that woman?!

Last night’s sleep was properly segmented, and the first such I’ve had in weeks. Some folks get all their nightly (or daily) sleep in one solid chunk. Sometimes I do, too. But usually my sleep is divided into two distinct parts: the first one being five or six hours long; and the second, coming sometime later in the day, is generally two or three hours long. And it’s this second sleep that usually contains my dreams. That was the case this morning.

In my dream…

…there was a higher degree of lucidity than is normally the case for me. This awareness that I was dreaming while I was in the dream manifested itself a number of times and finally allowed me to wake calmly from what would otherwise have been a rather disturbing situaton.

The setting of this dream was here in San Antonio. As a matter of fact, it began down in the residential foyer of the hotel in which I live.

As the door to the elevator opened, I found myself eye to eye with an attractive, smiling woman whom I apparently knew in the dream world, but whom I cannot place among the various women I know or have known in real life. I could see her very clearly, and heard the sound of her voice as we talked. I’m guessing that she may have been a composite of different individuals I know or have known. If I was an artist, (which I’m not, by the way), I could very easily draw a sketch of her.

She was headed out of the hotel as I was headed up to my apartment, but we decided to spend a little time together. We took a stroll down by the river, then rode the bus to a part of town where she was headed. At a number of times when we were walking and on the bus, things seemed more than a little strange, as they often do in dreams. When the strangeness would distract me from our conversation, I’d apologize to her, saying, “Oh, you’ll have to excuse me. I’m not usually this disoriented, but I’m dreaming.”

And she’d laugh lightly each time, telling me not to worry about it, that she understood completely. Then she’d put her hand on my arm or her arm in mine and I’d laugh, too. All would be well, then: happy and well.

When the bus finally dropped us off she used a pay phone at the bus stop to make a quick call. I looked around and realized that I didn’t know where we were at all. Looking back at where the pay phone had been I saw that it was gone, and so was the woman with whom I’d been spending time. The bus had pulled away. There I was standing in a strange place. But I realized that since I was dreaming, all I’d have to do is wake up and I’d know exactly where I was.

And that’s exactly what I did.

Game forfeited? (Not!)

After a nearly two-week stretch of time that involved a lot of traveling and dealing with a very stressful family situation, it’s nice to have my life returning to normal. It’s also nice to have the nature and pattern of my dreaming finally returning to normal, too.

Though I expect some serious siesta time sometime later today, that second sleep hopefully giving me an acceptable accumulation of total sleep hours for the day and most likely bringing the day’s most significant dreaming, the day’s first sleep woke me with a short, very intense dream.

In real life, one of my primary hobbies is playing correspondence chess. Taking my games seriously, I never lose them by running out of time. I may lose by having an opponent checkmate me, or I may lose by resigning from a game in which I consider my position to be hopelessly lost. But I’ll never lose a game by simply letting my clock run out of time, thereby forfeiting the contest to my opponent.

In my dream…

…that woke me with a jolt from today’s first sleep, I received notification from one of the chess clubs to which I belong that one of my games had just been forfeited to an opponent: I’d been declared the loser because I’d run out of time. In my mind there was the clearest, most realistic image of my computer monitor screen with my email list displayed. And one of those emails had as its title the game forfeiture notice. Whoah, Nellie!!

I was up and out of bed in near record time, and checking my email log. Thankfully, there was no game forfeiture notice there. Whew!

On hiatus

Just a quick note to say I’ll be gone for about a week or so attending to some personal business. Bloggage will probably range somewhere between extremely light to nonexistent during this time. But it will return to normal when I get back.

Till then,… sweet dreams, folks.

A murder, a mess,…

…and confusion on the stairs.

Wednesday’s dream came in the final, short part of another segmented sleep. Both parts of the sleep were very short and very late. The first was only an hour and a half long, from 16:00 t0 17:30, and the second was two and a half hours long, from 20:00 to 22:30 hours. Even though the total amount of sleep was only four hours long, the second segment was dream-filled and restful, so I’m not going to complain. Much.

In my dream…

…I was part of a two or three man interrogation team. We were debriefing a foreign agent whom we had recently captured.

This was taking place, interestingly enough, in the upstairs apartment of a big, old Italian in which I lived during my stay in Indianapolis, years ago.

There were three of us seated at a long table in what used to be my bedroom. I was sitting next to the prisoner, the leader of our team sat across from us, and we had a third man in another room guarding the door.

No sooner had I made the comment, “This is all going too smoothly,” when a shot from a sniper rifle somewhere outside blasted through a window and blew through our prisoner’s head, killing him instantly.

I dove under the table and heard our team leader say calmly, “Let’s clean up this mess and get the Hell out of here. Right now.”

So I hurried into the front room where our third team member was standing in the middle of the most chaotic clutter possible. And the front door was wide open. And all of our gear (ammo cases and comic books) was scattered in small piles both in the room and out the front door. Stepping through the front door I noticed the women across the hall had small stacks of their stuff mixed with the small stacks of our stuff in our common hallway and on almost all of the steps leading down to the outside door.

When I asked, “WTF?!”. Lucy Liu (yes, in my dream, Lucy Liu was one of the women who lived across the hall from me) explained that they were going to have a yard sale, but it was raining and they decided to stack everything inside rather than out on tables.

On hearing this I shook my head and…

…I woke up.