Three #Dreams: Two Nice and One Not

It’s interesting to note that at the present time and for the past week or so the dividing line between sleep and wakefulness has become increasingly blurry. This is so at both ends of a sleep segment, its beginning and its end, and sometimes at different points during the night and during the day. Now, I’m not complaining about this at all. Given my station in life and the complete Independence of my schedule on anything other than my own timetable, I’m free to enjoy this as a feature rather than gripe about it as a problem.

Hand in hand with this phenomenon is an unusually active dream-life. Last night brought me three that were extremely vivid and detailed. The first two were very fun, but the third was absolutely not.

Dream #1:
In this dream I chanced to overhear a cellphone conversation on my phone between two young women (neither of whom bore any resemblance to anyone I know or have ever known in the real, waking world) in which they were planning a private escapade. After listening to all the details of what, when, and where they were planning I decided to show up and enjoy myself with them. And I did. And a great time was had by all!

Dream #2:
A very similar activity to that shared by me and the two young women in the first dream was shared by me with a somewhat older woman in the second dream. Where the women in the first dream were, oh… maybe twenty-somethings, the woman in this one was perhaps forty or so. Again she was someone new that I’d just met, not anyone that I’ve ever known before or know now. And again, we had a great time.

Dream #3:
This was a return of a common nightmare, one which found me as a UPS delivery driver on the route in downtown Bloomington, IN, that I used to work for so many years. I’d been dispatched with a load that was impossibly huge: more packages and stops than I could possibly handle, more packages and stops than anyone could possibly handle. And I was running out of time. The day was ending and I had so damned much work left to do. I was racing the clock but I knew, I just knew there was no way I was going to get done. It was horrible! Simply horrible!

Lost, so lost.

Last night’s dream came awfully close to being a nightmare. It was another of the nasty, UPS-themed dreams that have been haunting me for years.

In my dream…

…I was a UPS driver trying to return to work after an extended absence. While I was gone, the DIADs (those little computer=clipboards the drivers use to collect signatures, to input data, etc.) had changed radically from the one I learned to use. I was expected to pick up the new model and immediately use it with the same level of efficiency as all the other drivers. But I’d received no training with the new model and I wasn’t going to be given any training.

When I asked for some instruction I was just pointed to a stack of packages and told, “Scan them, load them into a package car, and get the hell out of here and deliver them!”

In terms of knowing how to what I was told to do, I could not have been more lost.

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.

The 100 block of North College

March opened for me with a common-themed dream.

It’s interesting to note that for the longest time, a dream like this would have been nightmarish for me. But since I’ve become more serious about tracking my dreams, and since reading up on the experience and nature of lucid dreaming, I’m able to deal with these things more calmly and rationally.

In my dream…

…I was back in a UPS package car, making deliveries to stores and businesses located in the 100 block of North College in Bloomington IN. As they were in real life, my main concerns were four:

1. being under time-pressure, knowing that I had to complete a lot of work in a limited amount of time,
2. trying to find packages that were jammed into a too-small space in the package compartment of my truck, and many packages that were loaded “out of place,” so that I could make each delivery only once, without having to return to a store with boxes I’d found later,
3. dealing with traffic on the street where I was forced to double-park, or angry drivers whose cars I’d blocked while trying to do my job, and
4. presenting myself with an air of friendly efficiency to everyone with whom I interacted.

The visuals, tactile sensations, and sounds in the dream were vividly realistic, even though none of the people in it (other than me) were folks I recognized or remembered.

An office in my hallway

Last night’s second dream also had a strong element of lucidity. It was also longer and more detailed than the one that came earlier.

In this dream…

I was sleeping in bed when unusual noises in the hallway outside my door woke me. The sounds of furniture being moved, telephones ringing, and voices in conversation left me wondering what in the blazes was going on. So I rose from bed, threw on a pair of shorts, and went to my front door.

What I found when I opened the door shocked me. The hallway itself was wider than it is in real life. And much of this new, extra space was taken up by long tables, computers, printers, telephones, a manager, and a couple of interns who were scurrying about.

The office operation seemed to be the management of this hotel, and the office manager in this dream was a prostitute from upstairs who seemed incredibly unable to do her job, unless her job was getting me to do all her work for her. Man oh man!

She kept coming into my apartment, asking me how to do this and that, and asking to use my facilities, and telling me how lucky she was to have a go-to guy like me, etc., etc. Man oh man! It seemed that every time I laid my weary self down to rest, I had to get right back up to do something for her. The last time I rose from my pillow…

I really was rising from my pillow. I was waking up.