Dream State

Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.
Annie Dillard, "Pilgrim At Tinker Creek"

Can't sleep. Haven't a clue why, nor why the quote above resonated so strongly with me when I read it today. But I can't and it did, and I suspect they're related, so there ya' go.

We had all the windows in the house open today. Weather was perfect for it. After lunch, I dozed in a recliner in the living-room near an open window. Hey, I'm old, had no appointments, was feeling pretty laid back — so sue me.

I was only out for about a half-hour, but went directly into a deep dream state. Doubtless aided by the warmish breeze drifting over me, I dreamed a perfect summer from my youth. I seemed to be about 12 or 13. And I suddenly found myself suffocating, drowning in deep, dark water, sinking deeper the more I struggled, which woke me.

Not the worst dream I've ever had — it even started out good. I've got plenty of nightmare fuel sloshing around in the deep channels of my head, thanks, and a "drowning" dream hardly makes a noticeable cut at all. But since it was during a daylight nap, which meant it didn't disappear like the night ones do, and since I'm still thinking about it, which I normally don't do even with the horrorshow ones, it's pretty clear that it's something I ought to pay attention to.

On consideration, three things leapt out at me:

1. I went literally near-instantly into deep dream state as soon as I dozed off. This means I'm either not going "deep" enough or staying there long enough or both during my regular sleep hours. Physiological or psychological, I need to fix that. I've done without sleep and dreams for days many times in my life, and it always has a pretty terrible outcome.
   
   
2. I'm dreaming movie-style, probably never happened, happy-ending, summertime fiction of my youth. I had a good childhood, all considered, but I never had one of those Hollywood-movie summers.
   
   Like everyone else, when I think back that far (or even a lot less than that far) there's a nostalgic golden patina over everything that seems as real as actual life. It isn't, and I know that. But even by those standards, while this dream felt extremely nice, it was instantly identifiable as a dream of a version of life that never happened. I'm not sure, but I suspect my head is telling me it COULD have been like that if I hadn't wasted it, and giving me a little dopamine push to readjust something to that end.
   
   And I'd also bet some safe money that there's a more generalized point my brain is making than application to 12-year-old me. Making sense of unstructured dream logic is a tricky business, but that "feels" right.
   
   
3. The "drowning" bit is right out of a liberal arts Shrink 101 playbook. It's a dream about running out of time.
   

 

None of this means anything in particular, I suppose. It's just my brain trying to consolidate some set of concepts into a usable form to absorb some lesson and build automatic responses to be invoked when some obscure pattern is matched in the future, thereby theoretically increasing my odds of survival out here on the savanna. After all, that's pretty much what sleep and dreaming are all about in the first place. 

I do vaguely wonder if this is the sort of thing that's going on in my head in the middle of the night, and I just don't remember it.

But I'm going to have to keep an eye on it. This sort of thing left to its own devices can get under one's skin and start to fester. Now I just need to sort out whether my brain is prodding me to stop doing stupid shit like I'm going to live forever, or start doing more stupid shit because I'm NOT going to live forever.

Pfft. Brains can be so useless sometimes. Ignoring it and moving on, but keeping it in the corner of my peripheral view for a bit to make sure it doesn't stir any shit…