What-Did-You-Dream Game

Lady Euphoria had a fun post about having to log her dreams as part of a creative assignment. I have hilarious, outrageous, and often inspiring dreams and they go back as far as childhood.

My most vivid memory is of a dream I had when I was around 6 or 7 years old. In the dream I'm riding a large red and white yo-yo (it came up to my chest and was big enough for me to lay flat upon) down a snowy hill near the house where I grew up. When I get to the bottom, it's not winter any more; it's summer and I'm floating over the intersection. In the intersection, spreading out to cover all four of the corners, as an enormous fried egg (sunny side up).

Yes, the dreams are that detailed. And vivid.

My husband doesn't remember his dreams unless they are utterly terrifying, and then the dreams are not as full of color and detail as mine. I suspect the lack of color part might have something to do with his being slightly color blind, but I also think it's because his mind just doesn't take in details the way mine does. (This is not to say he is not a detail-oriented person. He is, but it's limited to the things he does well, such as cooking, woodworking, and archeology. I seem to be all details, all of the time.)

As I've grown older I've had dreams that are more like stories that are trying to work out their own plot lines (no matter how outrageous the people and circumstances involved). This morning I dreamed that I was involved in some kind of espionage / protection plot. I was on top of a series of buildings and we were protecting a woman who was designated as "the prophet." At one point we realized she'd been taken and the general alarm was raised. I was running through a kind of dormitory where young men (soldiers, guards) were sleeping and I was waking them and berating them for being in their beds. Then the prophet appeared (turned out it was my friend Trish) and I realized these guys were sleeping because they'd just gotten back from rescuing her. There's more to it than that, of course. There were large copper or bronze coins with a date of 1639 stamped in them and small cups everywhere that people were using the put these coins in; I was going around and collecting them. At some point I was in a gift shop, which was when I realized that all of this was a sort of historic reenactment, but the kidnapping part had been real as it had been engineered by a group who, for political reasons, didn't approved of what we were doing.

I don't get Freudian about these dreams. They are a kind of adventure in my sleep, like books I wouldn't otherwise have time to read or films I wouldn't otherwise have time to see. The only time I become concerned is when I have dreams that are so frightening that I wake feeling tense and frightened. Those are dreams that I don't care to retell or even to remember because they're not worth dwelling on. About the only information they give me is that I'm upset about something and need to attend to it.

One of these days I'll have time to flesh out some of these dreams into viable stories. Like, when the laundry is done. :)