Archives for January 2014

Recurring dreams are seldom pleasant but sometimes they are, in retrospect, amusing. As a young man, I had this dream over and over again about waiting with some message and then being shot and waking up in a hospital bed with people gathering around. At the time, I thought it was a very scary dream, a nightmare. But when I look back on it, the hubris of youth shows through. There was never any blood. There was never any real pain. People gathered to pay attention to the wounded me and I guess that I liked or needed that enough to go back to that place over and over again. I was never sure who was shooting me, although I suspected it was a grandfather that I never met.

One sometimes wishes that the recurring dreams were happier, like the time that I dreamt that I was pregnant. I could feel the life moving in this warm, liquid balloon that was growing happily inside of me. It was pleasurable and sensual, but I never had the dream again. Obviously, once was enough and when I told my friends about it, they laughed at me. I would like to have that dream again, but I am passed my child-bearing years.

The one that has been waking me up recently is different. It actually happened. I was about ten years old and we were playing ball and the ball rolled between a concrete building and brick building. I shimmied in to try to get it and then got stuck. The fire department had to be called and it took a long time to get me out and I was embarrassed because I was filled with scrapes and people were angry and asked how I could have been so stupid as to get myself caught like that.

When I first returned to that experience in a dream, it was horrifying. I could feel the stone pressed against my body. I was trapped. As it has returned again though, the space has gotten a little wider and I can see that there is a way out, just one that I didn’t understand because of my fear and the panic that caused me to swell up until I was immobile.

This falls under the category of the “being trapped” dream. It is supposed indicate that I am in some kind of rut or life circumstance which will not let me go. It appears on the list of categories for most common types of recurring dreams, along with falling, being chased, having your teeth pulled out or fall out, flying, being submerged in water, being publically exposed in some humiliating fashion, wandering in a house that keeps changing, or having something stolen from you. Checking over the list again, I see nothing about being shot.

My most frightening nightmare was discovering that I had a consciousness that was eternal but that after death it was alone in a complete void forever. I still shudder when I recall that one. Thankfully, it did not return.

The film Ground Hog Day is a recurring dream brought to fictional life. Happening over and over again, until Phil figures out what he needs to do to make it stop. But suppose you didn’t want your recurring dream to stop? Suppose it became like a song that you wished to play and then replay? Would your dreaming self just give up trying to communicate the message? Maybe the experience is the message. Or maybe, like Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea, the dream would bring you comfort before and after struggle.

Sometimes my dreams are very silly and happy. These are the ones where waking up can make you want to go back. They reveal us in ways that often expose places where we hold on to childhood dreams. A few years ago, Jackson Browne offered an item up for auction. It was studio time with him to work on a song of your own creation. I bid on it but got shut out at the end. A few weeks later, I dreamt that I met Jackson and that we became friends. That was the strangest recurring dream because it was like a mini-series with installments. But as soon as I told anyone about them, they stopped. Are some dreams meant to be kept secrets?

Shakespeare wrote, “we are such stuff that dreams are made on.” I wonder if he meant nightmares and recurring dreams too.

Finally there is that wonderful line from Bob Dylan, “At dawn my lover comes to me and tells me of her dreams with no attempt to shovel the glimpse into the ditch of what each one means.”

Sometimes we need to know what they mean and sometimes we just need to sleep with them.

 

 

 

Over The Side

 

I have had vertigo for a long time. Perhaps it is actually Acrophobia. I’m not sure when it started. When I was a young boy, I was the one who was fearless about climbing over the side of a roof on a six or seven story apartment building and making my way down the outside fire escapes to retrieve a ball. I actually earned spare change doing that once in a while.  But something happened as I grew older.

The most recent catalyst was a documentary about New York City by Ric Burns. As the photography depicted the rise of buildings, I could not help but envision myself going off of them, unwillingly. I find the feeling both recurrent and unpleasant.

I never wished to go to the top of the Empire State Building. There was that scene from Sleepless in Seattle that I enjoyed, but it didn’t display the sense of vulnerable height. I guess that I didn’t feel that when I climbed over rooftops.

I do not enjoy the thought of balconies, but I venture out onto them, always. At first I gaze to the horizon, then I look down. I feel the dizziness, that queasy, weak feeling of collapse and what that might mean. It is at that point that I find a grip on myself. I set about the process of affirming that I will live.

I prefer the window seat on an airplane. I don’t feel vertigo then. I don’t think that some emotion will sweep me over the edge. Or propel me through the skin of the plane. I am at relative peace, considering my circumstances.

I think it is that the wind rails at the walls but does not get in. I think it is the wind that has a sense of fate, sometimes. I can only smile as scientific data organizes itself in my mind about what the wind is. Friction and attraction in orbit. Turning in space.

But then I’m up high and the turning is sending me uncontrollably over the edge. What is that? Why does that happen?

I tend to prefer the upper level crossing when I drive over the George Washington Bridge, but I choose an inside lane. I have always smiled when I crossed the Tappan Zee, even when the wind created chaos. What is waiting over the edge? Haven’t I been there before? Do we mingle with over the edge for all of our lives?

It’s not a welcome acquaintance, but we all felt it necessary sometimes.

I like to dive deep. Under the water, where you need an extreme sense of focus. I passed those tests. I am certified to dive deep.

There is a reef in Grand Cayman.  My dive instructor said, “One hundred and twenty feet down and you establish neutral buoyancy, and then sit back and enjoy the ride. Neutral buoyancy is the equivalent of being weightless. One piles on a certain amount of baggage for this dive. It is proportional to the equation of body weight and the differences between salt and fresh water. It is regulated by an air jacket that can be inflated appropriately. The basic idea is to cause you to sink and then have your jacket balance you.

My instructor continued. “Over your shoulder is the most beautiful blue that you have ever seen. It is inviting. It will seduce you. It is six hundred feet deep and then you will die.”

When I dropped down, there was something that he hadn’t mentioned. I could feel the blue and the way that it pulled at me. I focused on my instruments and on the passing panorama of the wall. Was it the absence of wind? Or was current now the wind?

The brain coral has a design symmetry that elicits a kinship. I floated, weightless, neutral buoyancy achieved. Is it a different kind of epiphany when your body resonates in conjunction with your mind?

Floating but not falling over the edge and falling, which is where this began.   Swept over the edge. Struggling against it. Knowing it will come. Wanting to step back into some cocoon. Discovering an alternative.

Sometimes I turn my face from the screen. I feel the images whirling. It’s just heady and my body feels it differently, than I did when floating along that wall.

Astrologically, my sun sign is in Gemini. I’m predestined to fall in love with a breeze. Under the water, I am sometimes transformed. But that recurring, helpless feeling of being swept over the edge… The seductive blue so far under the surface… The current is a breeze in a different world.

I am frightened by height and attracted by depth. What we jettison to fly we use to help us submerge when we dive. The saying among divers is that any dive from which you surface alive was a good one. I question that application to height. The wind in my hair and at my back shouldn’t make me need to hold on tighter. I was not born to fly but I seem to have a tendency for diving.

 

Perhaps I am just afraid to truly fly. Maybe a leap is so different from a dive, maybe they are both the same. I know more about how to surface than I do about how to pull up. Swimming to the light is like flying. But if I am blown over the edge I won’t be able to fly upward because of what holds me here.

I’ve seen the sea turtle and the moray eel up close and wild. The birds have not been as accessible. The frantic nature of captured flight is so different from the powerful smooth strokes of airborne freedom. A bird in a building is never at rest until it has found a way out. But I’d just get pulled over the side. When you cannot fly, the final way out is to collide. I feel that plunging fear, and I fear how it influences my life.

The ride back from a dive is the sweetest of all rides. The sun and the air are like angels at your side. Skimming the waves and balancing a smile. It was a great ride and you’re still alive.

I remember the opening scenes from the film version of West Side Story and how they excited me. That must have been before. I feel vividly queasy when Al Pacino plays the Devil on a rooftop ledge. I try not to go to the ledges any more. But they still find me in my dreams.

Music and poetry can sweep me over this edge. I can ride and fly on those succulent waves. Sometimes it doesn’t feel real. Sometimes it just feels vain. What does it mean to fly when you can’t fly away?  The sky is above us. The sea almost moves like a flame.