2 posts tagged “dreams”

INFINITE THOUGHT

"Undergoing a seriously bad bout of insomnia/jetlag coupled with excruciatingly unpleasant dreams, I start to wonder what cinema would look like if dreams were not a common feature of psychic life. Dreams are extraordinary lies: the death of a friend, the disintegration of teeth, the taste of blood, the guilt felt at the accidental death of someone in your care are real, physically felt phenomena. The tears cried in dreams create the same exhaustion as tears cried in waking life, and the unpleasantness and terror that lingers after witnessing a violent death or spending what seemed like several hours wondering around with a mouth filled with vomit, blood and broken teeth remains with you during the day. You can taste it. Just as the false movement and emotional wrench of much cinema creates a kind of depthless empathy and pity for the reflection of a world which doesn't exist, dreams too invent pathos for a nonreality, but one which is unfortunately, and tiresomely, caught between the confines of your own skull. The combined boredom and discomfort of listening to the dreams of another is a kind of fear of this confined subjective illusion, the infinite space of a claustrophobic...nutshell."

***

I had a dream last night that I was walking and discussing the family with a charming elder gentleman.
I was asking him questions and kind of bitching about this person and that person, and wondering who this man was.

Little by little,  in the way that things happen in dreams, I realized that this was my husbands father, who I had never met.

He had died when my husband was just a teenager.

He was welcoming me to the family house, and showing me around,  and saying that there were "lots of people in here just like that."  It was a feeling of warmth and charm, and the reassurance not to fret about current circumstances because there was this larger context for things.

I woke up, certain that I had talked to him.
I've had quite a few dreams like that that are different from the normal run-of-the-mill variety of dream in intensity and feeling.   The feeling is always one of a gradually deepening reality ,  an awakening into the sense that "this is really happening..."   More about this later...