One Man's Meat

[mrissa]

I get confused when I hear people talking about their dreams and their nightmares, because the things that qualify as nightmares for other people and the things that qualify as nightmares for me are not really similar.

I often have dreams where I've gone somewhere naked where it would usually be inappropriate, but it's never uncomfortable. Nobody ever seems upset by it, least of all me. Also I have dreams where I'm falling, but they're happy falling dreams, floaty cloud dreams.

If there's a bishop in my dreams, though, you can guarantee it's about to get deeply unpleasant.

Other nightmares -- well, there's the one where I can't protect some loved one from something hideous, that's pretty obvious, but if I'm riding in a car, it's very very bad, and I don't usually feel at all upset about riding in a car. And being in school again is always a horrible dream, not because I'm unprepared, but because I'm overprepared. Because I explain to them that I've done differential equations and calculus of complex variables and any number of things, and they still make me do third-grade math worksheets, and all of my arguments about why I shouldn't have to go through that get me nowhere. And that makes sense, because I made functionally similar arguments at the time and still had to do the damn worksheets. I had generally a pretty good college experience, with only some specific bad classes, but any dream where I'm back at college is a bad one. I just don't like dreams of going back.

So while I'm cleaning the house and looking for distractions, do you have dreams that don't connect up with how other people talk about them? Other people's nightmares that come out fine, or your nightmares that are hard to explain? Or do you always have neutral dreams, or do you remember your dreams at all?

Comments

[sculpin.livejournal.com]

Mostly I have fabulous, megalomaniac wish-fulfillment adventure dreams. This probably says something terrible about my character, but I sure do enjoy the dreams. I've defeated the devil with a cup of chicken soup; I've blasted a psychic mind-control network with the life force of an armload of celery; I've composed and sung an entire opera in fake Italian about the glories of vegetarian cooking.

I wind up going to hell a lot, but I like it there. It's a calm, soothing place. The gods of my version of hell are pretty mellow, and they'll turn a blind eye to people sneaking out and in. A typical hell dream: my friend Chris was working on a paper in a university library. There was a minor earthquake, and a book popped off the shelf and hit him in the head, killing him. So our mutual friend Joy and I took a cab to hell to get him back. Charming the chthonic gods into letting him go was easy, but Chris himself proved difficult. We found him in an exactly similar library in hell, working on the same paper. He was writing a phrase, crossing it out, writing another, crossing it out, writing the first phrase again, etc. We couldn't get him to leave. He brandished his papers at us. "With all this peace and quiet," he said, "look at how much I'm getting done!"

My nightmares, when I have them, are usually of the "someone is in my house" variety. I used to have repetitive bad dreams about a certain character who'd been in my life, but then I was lucky enough to have a good bout of lucid dreaming during one of those nightmares. Knowing it was a dream, I hit him over the head with my heavy brass music stand, kicked him in the stomach, threw him out of the house, and locked the door behind him. He never bothered me in my dreams again.

Other nightmares involve having to drive somewhere. (Given that I'm car-phobic and do not drive, that's not so surprising.) Recently I dreamed I had to drive a fire truck around the neighborhood without getting caught by the police.

[sculpin.livejournal.com]

Well, those are the usual nightmares. The really disturbing nightmares, though, those always seem to be one-off jobs. Like the dream that major surgical operations were sponsored by large corporations in return for advertising time. A heart transplant included the addition of tiny flute-like filters that whispered advertising slogans with every heartbeat as the blood rushed through them. "Coke is it. Coke is it. Coke is it." Or this one (http://www.livejournal.com/users/sculpin/145419.html).

Actually, I guess both of those may refer to heart surgery, metaphorically or otherwise, and maybe it's worth noting that I had heart surgery when I was very small. Huh. I'll have to watch for that.