Dreams. I forget who said it, but they're a crazy sort of thing. Humans are so rational, so focused on everything following rules and making sense, but every night, we close our eyes and have what amounts to an acid trip. Depending, of course, on what kind of dreams you have.
Mine follow rules, my rules true, but rules nonetheless. They are peopled by familiar faces and places, and I am in control. Sometimes I am the central figure in my dreams, living them out like a second life; while in other dreams, I serve almost as an omniscient director, pausing the flow of the dream, rewinding and re-shooting the previous scene to make the outcome more pleasant. Or more terrifying, if I'm in one of those moods.
For the longest while, I thought everyone could control their dreams. Call it the arrogance of youth, the belief that everyone perceives the world the way you do. That everyone interacts with the world in the same way... yours. It wasn't until I met someone that had true nightmares that I realized other people couldn't guide their dreams, couldn't decide when and where they wanted to be in their sleeping mind.
Now I know that I'm abnormal, whatever that means. Some people call what I do 'lucid dreaming,' meaning that I'm always conscious, even while I'm supposedly unconscious. I simply think my own personal arrogance extends that deep into my psyche. When awake, I have supreme confidence in my ability to control any situation I come across; why should it be any different while sleeping?
I want to share two examples with the reader, two places I've been that I find interesting. We'll begin with last night's dream.
It began as a simple rehash of the tired vampire noir. There was a coven of pale, blond vampires, seen in a blue tinged world. They were beautiful, but filled all the stereotypes one expects of the genre. Their leader was tall, strong, cold and harsh; his second was lithe, feminine, but slim; there was a reckless, callous fool; and the final vampire was a quiet one, darker than the rest.
The heroine of my dream wore Jessica Biel's face, but was often cast aside as I decided not to focus on her. Even now, I don't know why the vampires wanted to turn the heroine into one of their own. Yes, she was pretty... though, she was a brunette which would clash with their blond clan dynamic... but, other than her looks, there was no real reason for the vampires to want her.
In all honesty, I spent the night developing the characters of the coven. I would begin a scene in the lair of the leader, him sitting behind a large, mahogany desk in a library, flitting through forms and papers, then pull back, rewind, and add a fireplace, flanked by servants. Humans, kept to feed their Master, as evidenced by the bite marks on their necks and wrists. He wore a business suit in the modern mode, hair laid flat on his skull. In comes his second. She wears black, form fitting silk. She moves with a casual grace, reporting to her Sire that their rogue has created another scene.
The camera flits away, we're in a penthouse, bodies and blood litter the suite. Out from the bedroom walks the reckless vampire. He's wearing minimal clothing, a loose white cotton tank top and a pair of boxerbrief underwear, both marked with bloodstains. He stretches, muscles moving in the cold, bright moonlight. Suddenly he twists and finds the second sitting, neatly, in a lounge chair. In the chaos of the suite, she is the only piece of order, and it gathers around her, like water pooling in a depression. She chides him for creating such a mess as she rises from her seat. He tenses, eyes flicking for the exits, but in a flash of fangs, he dies. As the second leaves the suite, one more body grows cold in that room covered in gore.
With a long shot, my mind's camera pulls back out the window, into a snow filled sky, spiraling around the cityscape of my dream. It's not New York, Chicago, Seattle, or any other city I know well enough to recognize. It is simply a city, full of buildings and people. Full of cold. Falling with the snow, the camera lands in a public park where our heroine walks, pushing a stroller. Inside is a baby, sleeping, and wrapped to protect it from the cold. I don't know why she has a child now. It doesn't make sense. I pause my dream, and the stroller, and the child within, are gone. Now, the heroine walks alone, a long, dark coat with a matched set of gloves and a scarf. There are bright, white Christmas lights hanging between trees and posts, creating globes of light in the snowy sky, but doing little to actually light the park or its paths. As she walks, her breath puffs, adding to the misty feeling. The snow thickens, and now we can barely see the trees at the edge of the path. The heroine is afraid. Suddenly, she comes face to face with the second, dark eyes and bright fangs framed by straight blond hair. The heroine tries to run away, ducking and dodging. (I feel glad that I got rid of the stroller earlier, knowing it would have hampered her escape attempts now.) No matter where she dodges, how she flees, those eyes find her. Even from my perspective, all we see are the dark eyes framed by that light hair.
After a moment, I realize my dream is becoming repetitive. How many times can my heroine be startled as a vampire leaps from the darkness?
I open my eyes, awake, but not rested. I enjoyed my dream, yes... but it was not the peaceful sleep one expects. I did not rest, even though I slept.
Another dream I had, months ago, was a different sort. I still knew it was a dream, but where last night's dream moved in movie time, cutting from scene to scene, this other dream felt like it was real time.
After I relaxed my mind and drifted off to sleep, I found myself in a small town. It looked like a stereotypical town you'd find anywhere from the Depression through to the 70s. There was a main street, lined with shops; side streets filled with houses, each with their own yard and kids; and as you left town, there were farms for as far as the eye could see.
I was standing there, just taking it all in, when my life kicked into gear. A young woman grabbed my arm and pulled me along with her to the bank. We were buying one of those farms. Even in the moment, I never caught her name. She was simply my girl. The man at the bank didn't want to loan us the money we'd need to start a farm right, but I put some pressure on him, reminding him who my father was. One part of my mind knew that would do the trick, and it did, but the more conscious part of my mind, the part that knew this was a dream had no idea who my father was, or why he had the influence to make a banker loan us money. I decided then, though, that it did not matter. As long as the dream moved along on its own, I wouldn't stop it for little details like that.
My girl and I signed the papers, and we became landowners with enough extra cash to buy the numerous things one needs to farm properly. After the bank, we walked to a supply store and arranged to have enough seed and supplies for a couple of years delivered. My girl wandered around while I argued with the clerk about extra fees, the whole while, she had a small, secretive smile on her face, as if she were used to me bickering over little details.
From there, we drove out to our farm, and began a life. We moved in what little we owned, bought what else we might need, and went from there.
Think about the last time you had to watch a clock, to really pay attention to how long a thing took. You could feel that time pass. In that dream, I felt time pass. I worked my farm and I lived my life with my girl. We grew crops, we had children, and I felt every hour of it. There were good times and bad, we grew old. We had to sell the farm, eventually, because my kids didn't want to be farmers, and I was too old to work the land anymore. My girl and I bought a home back in town, one of those houses on the side street with its own yard, and my grandkids played out front.
My girl died. She was old and tired too, but I still thought I should have gone first. After living a few months without her, I sat down on our porch and closed my eyes.
I woke up in my bed, feeling weary, tired, and stiff. I'd just lived sixty years in eight hours of sleep. Thinking about it now, I still feel my heart lurch when I remember the joy I felt at buying my farm, how angry I was when my son said he didn't want my damned old farm, and how broken I felt looking at the quiet, dead body of the woman who shared my life.
That was a quiet morning for me, as I tried to process my dream. Those emotions were real, and I felt raw for having so many all at once. In the waking world, our emotions come for a given situation, and we have time to heal before we face the next onslaught, but that morning, I felt a life's worth of triumphs and tragedies.
Throughout that long dream, I heard that quiet voice in my head. I knew I was dreaming, but I also knew I was living. If I stopped to worry about the details, I'd stop living, and then where would I be?
Dreams are powerful things, crazy as the day is long. What separates a dream from reality? The only thing that differentiates my dream-life from the life I'm living right now is that more people agree that this is really happening. I could be dreaming now, only to wake up when it's all over and start my day in my real life.
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