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The dreams are not your friends

I'll forgo any discussion of how wacked out my sleep schedule is--suffice it to say that I'm waking up for the day right now. Yesterday was a long day, a combination of my wonky schedule with some department obligations.

So I slept a little more than normal, and as often happens when I do, I did a little vivid dreaming. Not that this is strictly relevant, but for as long as I can recall, I've dreamt in color, and while I go through phases, I usually can remember dreams pretty well. My dreams also tend to be heavily synthetic, bringing together people, places, and issues from my whole life in odd ways. It's not all that unusual, for example, to find a colleague suddenly married to the junior high school bully, or whatever.

So last night, there were 2 main people besides me in my dream, one whose house I was visiting, and another who I was supposed to meet there and do something with. These two people, in addition to not reading my blog, to my knowledge have never met nor ever lived in the same city, but there you go. Anyhow, Friend 1 lived in a house-ish place, in the middle of a big city (might have been NY) that was the size of a city block, and had an interior park, which is where most of the dream took place. My visit coincided with some sort of office party that my friend was hosting, and so I spent the majority of the time having really awkward conversations with (mostly) people I didn't know (there were a couple of random people from other times in my life who miraculously worked at Friend 1's office, of course). As this was going on, apparently Friend 1 decided to ditch on the party, as I surface from one awkward conversation to find a bunch of the people, including Friend 1, gone.

And in the dream, this isn't a big deal, because Friend 2 is coming in a few minutes, and we're supposed to go out and do stuff. So there's some weird stuff that goes on with multiple showers, rooms within rooms, Escher kind of stuff, but everything goes fine. Then Friend 2 arrives, with 3 other unknown people in tow, and I'm invited to join them as 5th wheel on their double date. I go ballistic, and get into a really nasty shoutdown with Friend 2, and end up basically leaving. I'm not big on the walkout, but I have been known to employ it, and apparently here, I do.

I woke up not long after that, so at least I got some closure, I suppose. But the thing is that I woke up kind of angry at both Friend 1 and 2, and that's what makes me feel a little uneasy. I'm mad at them for stuff that I dreamed. And rationally, I know that there's no justification for how I feel, and it'll fade in a couple of days, easy, but still. I know pretty much what the dream is about, and I have a solid sense of what all is contributing to this kind of dream--I could even work up an educated guess about why Friends 1 & 2 were the ones my unconscious chose to express this stuff.

None of it quite dissolves the unhappiness I feel at 2 of my friends right now, right or wrong.

That is all.

Comments

oh man, i do this all the time.

just last night, i had a very bad dream about someone betraying me. i woke up feeling very hurt, though it made no sense.

Collin,

Oooo, I love analyzing dreams. I've been keeping a dream journal for years. I know Lacan is the pyschoanalytic theory guy but for practical dream therapy, I rely heavily on Fritz Perl's Gestalt Therapy. Perls believed that everything and everyone in our dreams is a manifestation of ourselves. If you dream about a train, you are the train or maybe you're the tracks or even the cow about to be hit by the train. So maybe you were angry at a manifestation of yourself that was represented in your dream by your two friends. The question to ask is, what were you angry about? Another interpretation might be that the two friends remind you of two other people or even one other person, and that you used the friends to express anger at someone you can't do that with. Just a thought.

Nancy

PS - I had a nice email chat with Tammy Bird a few weeks ago. She says hi.

But you left out crucial info: How high was Friend 1's shower head?

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