Recently I’ve been taking part in a dream workshop over zoom, where a group of us get together each week to talk a bit about various notions of dream theory and then discuss some of our dreams. It’s been a while since I’ve posted to this blog, so I thought I would update it with some recent dreams I’ve had over the last month or so. There are quite a few of them (more than I will include here), and while it may be a bold reveal on my part I figured I would post several of them as a sequence. As best I can I will let the dreams speak for themselves. What context I will provide, for those who do not know me or who are otherwise new to this blog, is that I am an out of work carpenter who is dealing with cancer. Although I have spent most of my life in and around Chicago, I have also lived and worked in Wisconsin, among other places. These dreams are presented chronologically, but many dreams are omitted.
Free As A Bird
I’m standing in an empty room. It feels like an office, or some kind of commercial building. Maybe a doctor’s office. It’s after hours. No one else is around. The walls are tall, lots of steel and wood and glass, lots of tall rectangles, a bank of windows in front of me. The floor is a gray carpet with a textured pile. I’m looking out at an interior landscape, typical office furniture beyond the windows I’m facing, fluorescent lights etc. A hallway on the other side of the windows opens up to my right, into darkness or a forest, but I’m not looking in that direction. There are windows behind me. I can tell that it is dark outside because there is no light coming through the windows. There’s some sort of closet to my left, but I’m not looking there either. My attention is drawn to a pair of doors that make up the corner of the room to my left and in front of me, at right angles to one another. It’s the door on the left where the action takes place.
The doors are typical for a commercial install, heavy oak slabs, steel frames, commercial hardware. There’s a consistent 3/8″ gap between the door, the jamb, and the stop the whole way around. This wouldn’t make sense in the real world but the important thing for the dream is that the gap is uniform. Some type of bird, maybe a finch, gold and black, is trying to squeeze its way through the gap between the door and the jamb. In its beak the bird is carrying a twig, or maybe a sprig of cedar, for its nest. I have the sense that the twig is one thing and then another. The bird is trying to squeeze itself like a mouse through the tiny gap, and it makes itself round, but it can’t fit through. It’s stuck there, round, wings flapping, like a cartoon. There’s a right angle where the door jamb meets the door stop, so the gap is L-shaped. I feel if it were just a straight gap that the bird would be able to make it on its own, but it’s stuck there in that corner. I decide to let the bird in.
I’m Batman
I’m in the basement of Wayne Manor. There’s some sort of heist or siege underway, and Alfred has the evening’s security detail up for me on the monitors. The monitors are holographic and display the stats like a classic video game – strength, stamina, and various attributes alongside a portrait of the character. At issue is whether I’m going to take care of the situation myself, which would be a guaranteed success but which would betray my secret identity, or whether I leave it to the hired help. The guy on the monitor is the quintessential ’80s video game commando. His credentials say that he’s a trained assassin. I decide to let him handle it.
The scene changes to an overhead view of Wayne Manor, from high up in the air. It must be a drone. The camera is looking down on a tall crane, several stories high, which is involved in the heist. Although it’s late at night and dark outside the crane is lit up and outlined in red, like a wireframe from a first generation videogame. It looks sort of like a stock market chart. The roles have changed and the guy who was supposed to be in charge of security is now leading the heist. He’s in the bucket of this crane and there’s some sort of sci-fi trope with a magnet or mechanism not lining up with the top of Wayne Manor, a lock or a hatch. The connection doesn’t happen and the guy in the crane is in real danger as there’s a precipitous drop.
Next I’m in a hospital room with my brother. We’re watching the siege take place on television. It’s early the following morning, just after dawn. There’s a brown shriveled up woman in the hospital bed, in an embryonic or fetal position, almost like a husk, or an alien. She doesn’t say anything the entire dream. There’s a curtain but it isn’t drawn shut. I’m trying to get news of the siege but the television coverage changes from a live update to the regular morning news program, and they just mention the siege in passing as something that happened earlier, on to the next segment. I’m like “well, that’s all we’re going to get” and my brother and I are discussing who is going to leave the hospital to deliver my dad his meds. Even though the news coverage has stopped, there’s still an ongoing situation outside. It’s like a war zone, or the aftermath of one. There’s difficult terrain to traverse, a white haze everywhere. It’s not safe. I volunteer that since I’m already on meds, I can take my dad his meds. A cake and eat it too scenario. A nurse interrupts and asks if it’s a good idea for me to take somebody else’s meds, and I realize that no, it isn’t a good idea. I look at the meds in my palm. There’s a single dried up pill that looks sort of like a cashew, and also reminds me of a fish that decorates a small urn which I keep filled with water on my shrine at home. The cashew also looks sort of like the woman in the hospital bed.
Baby You Can Drive My Car
The first part of this dream is hard to recall, but there’s a sense that there’s a lot of work to be done, and that a lot of work is getting done. There’s a number of vehicles driving to and fro. I can see them all from overhead. The image is reminiscent of a circulatory system. Materials and product are getting delivered. It’s a big production. It’s probably late afternoon.
Scene change. It’s late at night, maybe even midnight, a blizzard in Wisconsin. Somewhere rural, with pine trees. I’m at a four way intersection, simple two-lane roads in each direction. Although the light is green traffic proceeds as if the light isn’t working. First one pair of cars goes by, then the adjacent direction takes a turn. Half of the vehicles are pickup trucks. There’s a sense that the cars can’t get through on their own, and that the trucks have to go through first and crush the snow so that the smaller cars can pass. First a truck, then a car, then another truck. There’s a figure looming over this entire scene, someone I’ve worked with in waking life. Although he isn’t present in the dream I can hear him commenting on the situation. This is someone whose politics I find loathsome, but whose professionalism is beyond reproach. I wouldn’t want to spend much time with him outside of work, but when it comes to matters of his trade I trust him completely. As the cars and trucks are taking their turns clearing the intersection, I hear this guy comment over the dream that this is just what we do here, we take care of each other. Polite society! I’m two or three cars back in line, and when it’s my turn I make a right turn at the intersection. I’m driving an even bigger truck than I ordinarily drive, and as I clear the intersection and feel the snow crunching beneath my tires I’m filled with a real sense of pride and joy, that I have a job to do, and that I can help others by doing so.
Now I’m driving along Main Street, slowly, in a small Wisconsin town. Every other storefront is a bar or a deli, a butcher shop, a supper club. I can see the patrons through the windows and everyone looks like they are having a gay old time. Since I’ll never get home in this blizzard, I decide I should spend my night at the bar and have some fun, maybe even get something to eat. I look for somewhere to pull over and find a spot next to this convenience store. It’s a store from another era, hand painted signs in the windows, white sandwich board out front. I size things up and if I pull my enormous truck right up tight against the storefront, there will still be room for traffic to get by on this small street. There is no traffic, and my truck isn’t anywhere to be seen either. The street has already been plowed and packed down, but I need to clear away the snow from against the storefront to make room for my truck (which isn’t really there, but still takes up a lot of space). There’s an oversize steel snow shovel leaning against one of the storefronts, with a big square blade, but when I look again all of the snow has been meticulously cleared away.
I cross the street to one of the bars, and when I enter it’s an amalgam of bar, supper club, deli, and cafeteria. There’s a winding mahogany bar or deli case, serpentine, as if for a very long queue. The lighting is subdued, with sconces and lampshades. I make my way to the back of the bar, directly to where my ex-girlfriend and her boyfriend are seated. I make a big show of pretending not to see them and they don’t acknowledge me. Instead I’m perusing the deli case directly in front of them. There are some sort of dressed buns in the case. I think they’re dressed with sauerkraut.
Someone’s carrying a tray of Easter ham with pineapple through the restaurant. It smells so delicious that I can still taste it long after I wake up. I follow the tray like a cartoon character, lifted along by the scent, to the center of the cafeteria, near the counter with all the plates and silverware, by the register. Someone asks for my order and I ask for ham and pineapple. In the deli case in front of me there’s some sort of slaw or curry made from ham and pineapple, but it’s a cold dish and it looks like it would be better as a side. I ask if there’s anything hot, but I don’t find anything that appeals to me.
Park and Ride
I’m back in Wisconsin. It’s early morning, and while the sun is bright there’s snow everywhere. I’m looking for my vehicle. I find it in a parking lot next to the on-ramp of an expressway. There’s a ticket on my windshield, maybe multiple tickets, but when I try to read what the ticket is for, I can’t make any sense out of it. I pull an orange ticket envelope out of my shirt pocket, but I can’t read that either. There’s a dim awareness that I can’t read these things because I’m dreaming and that there aren’t any real words there, but I let that go and disregard the tickets, perhaps not wanting to wake up from my dream so soon. My vehicle isn’t familiar to me, but it might be the first pickup truck that I drove, which I sometimes still get to drive in my dreams. That vehicle would be thirty years old now. This truck has a rusted hood and various colored, mismatched body panels. It’s either an SUV or there’s a cap on the back. I try to back the truck up onto the ramp – there’s plenty of room to back up, as the parking spot is overly long – but traffic is stopped along the ramp. I get out of the truck to see what’s going on and there’s snow piled up all the way to hood height between the tires where the truck was parked. I look down the ramp and Chicago cops have got the expressway blocked off. I can tell it’s Chicago cops because the barricades are those blue wooden sawhorses with the ward number and alderman written on them. I don’t pay attention to which ward or alderman.
I’m in my truck, stopped in traffic on the ramp, sitting behind an industrial looking pickup truck, maybe belonging to a utility company. It’s the kind of truck with big metal toolboxes and cabinets on the back. Out of nowhere, some vehicle tries to squeeze between my truck and the truck in front of me. He scrapes through but he pops open the cabinets on the truck in front of me and gouges up both his vehicle and mine. I don’t really give a shit about the hood of my truck because it’s a mess anyway. Whoever this other guy was he’s gone like the breeze.
The scene changes and I’m in a different vehicle, but I’m still trying to get around the traffic jam. I’m driving along a winding wooded road in a forest preserve or suburban area. It’s later the same morning but it’s no longer winter. The trees are dense with leaves, almost overgrown. It feels like late summer. I’m driving very fast in what is the wrong direction, in order to get around this backed up traffic and come at it from the other end.
Now I’m standing in the driveway of a sprawling suburban ranch in this overgrown woods. The house isn’t rectangular but branches off in several directions, like a couple of conjoined Y shapes or maybe a chemistry diagram. I’m with my mom’s BFF, and her mom is there too. Her mom is Mrs. Stone. That’s her actual name, but it feels significant for the dream that the woman’s name is Stone. I don’t recall how long ago she passed away but in the dream she’s in her 90s. She’s sitting on a chair in front of the garage, and her mouth is stuffed full of straw and cable, almost as if she’s intubated. She’s chewing on this straw, swallowing it and spitting pieces out. It’s gross and vulgar. I ask my mom’s BFF if her mom is okay.
I don’t get an answer because we’re interrupted by the arrival of another character, a second rate Christian Slater wanna-be who also reminds me of a transphobe that I used to work with and would just as soon not see again. This guy is just sitting on his ass next to the house along the side of the driveway like we owe him something. I’m about to approach him when this crystal sports car pulls into the driveway, and I’m like “Sorry! Can’t talk, my ride’s here!” There’s something not quite right about this crystal sports car. It’s in fact a paperweight that my Dad used to have on his desk, probably a ’53 Vette. There’s a sense that for one thing this car is too small, and also that it’s a solid piece of crystal – the doors won’t open. It’s these concerns that bring me out of the dream and I wake up.
