A flood in the laundry room

It is with a great sense of relief that I note the return of dreaming to my sleep segments. For approximately the past week I’ve been rather under the weather: not terribly sick, not enough to keep me from functioning, but certainly visiting enough unpleasant symptoms on me to restrict my activities. That nastiness appears to have passed, thank God, and things seem to be returning to normal.

During the week of illness my sleeps were nearly devoid of dreams, they were certainly empty of any dreams I can mention here. But now I’m feeling better, generally, and I have dreams to post. Today’s second sleep segment brought me a pair of interesting and unrelated dreams.

In my first dream…

… there was an episode of flooding here in the hotel where I live.

Noticing the unusual sound of running water outside in the hallway, I opened my door and saw a big water stain on the carpet in front of the laundry room. The laundry room, by the way, was situated next door to my apartment just as it is in real life. The stain was growing larger by the second, fed by a mini-waterfall cascading from the slightly elevated floor of the laundry room, which is one step higher than the level of the hallway.

Very curious about this situation, I looked into the laundry room (which, in this dream, was much deeper than in real life) and saw a plumber working feverishly with a big wrench at some pipes in the back of the room. “Looks like we have a bit of a flood here,” I shouted back to the plumber.

He turned to me and yelled back, as he continued to work, “And it’s a cold flood, too! I’m about to freeze! Hopefully I’ll be able to get it stopped pretty soon!”

Looking at the mess I shook my head and… woke briefly.

On the work of dreaming

My dreams continue vividly and almost nightly. Unfortunately, they continue to be primarily about private folks whom I know in real life. Therefore they can’t pass through my self-imposed filter regarding subjects I will not share in this public journal. It is assumed this stretch of “dreams that must remain private” will pass (it always does) and regular, wacky dreaming will return.

In my reading the other night, I did come across something you might find interesting.

There are those who contend that almost everyone dreams almost every night, even if those dreams are unremembered. And there are those who contend that this dreaming is important work. I agree with both of these contentions by the way.

The following paragraph from Neal Stephenson’s Anathem addresses this matter:

My mind was about half sorted out. Many of the new ideas, events, people, and images that had come at me from every direction the day before had been squared away, like so many leaves rolled up and thrust into pigeonholes. Not that anything had really been settled. All of the questions that had been open when my head had hit the pillow were still pending. But in the intervening hours, my brain had been changing to fit the new shape of my world. I guess that’s why we can’t do anything else when we’re sleeping; it’s when we work hardest.