This morning I had a dream within a dream. Not only that, but in the dream I received an interpretation (though rather superficial) of the dream I'd 'awoken' from. It went like this:
I and two quite excellent friends of mine sat languidly in porch chairs midway between our porch stoop and a grand urban beach set before us. A sunset, burning orange skies almost threatening in their serenity cast upon a compliant ocean dancing trepidly and eagerly, reflecting and playfully defracting the persistent levelled hues of the setting sun cascading upon its surface. Across this bay a veritable cityscape, its own noxious exhausts no doubt contributing to the exuding brilliance of the dusk. But we are watching an intermediate, an old television propped up showing some crass amalgamation of (as far as I can tell) Gilligan's Island, Casablanca, and a line from Troy I'd picked up several hours earlier ('You shall be my slave, a dancer made to scrub the floors of my palace. And at night...) all seemingly set to the tune of a bad reproduction of Greek tragedy. I close my eyes for a moment to take it in, to try to grasp these vaguely familiar straws. And open again: the sky is brooding, the tangible exuberance of the orange dusk has turned to a impenetrable gray havoc, a foreboding shadow struck across every angle. I see forming in the distance an ominous streak across the ironclad skyscape, what my mind calls (having never seen one before) a tornado. Not just one but a whole family now twisting this way and that in their own chaotic designs, weaving their ways through concrete skyscrapers that seem to accept their presence with looks of sinister accessory. One bears its curves directly towards us and I urge my friends inside. They, reluctant to comply, calmly go through the door. As I'm doing the same I turn around at the threshold and find myself staring the cyclone in the eye. It hits me, and I wake up.
Or so I think. I'm now lying awake in bed. This seems about right. It's a warmly lit but sparsely furnished house, or maybe a condo. Mostly familiar people are humming around. They seem to be packing up to leave somewhere. I find myself thinking about tornadoes. "Does anyone know what the dream-symbol of tornadoes means?" I ask, as if it is something one takes a class on or can look up in an encyclopedia. A good friend of mine, one who has little to do in my mind with either meteorology or psychoanalysis, turns to me and in a friendly but formal fashion informs me, "A tornado. Transient operators beyond your control. An upheaval. A reconfiguration stripping away the material world around you." Then, dropping this tarot card-esque countenance he says "You're probably just worried about losing all your things next May," presumably referring to my impending graduation. The rest of the dream is the commonly strange sort of riff-raff most dreams are seeped in.
Moving down (or up?) a level of abstraction, I do actually wake up and spend a good deal of time thinking about the dream, not because it affected me particularly profoundly, but just that I found it rather interesting and because the beach and storm of the inner dream were beautiful and I wanted to try and maintain an image of them. I tell a roommate about it and she tells me two things: that the dream-interpretation given by my friend is an indication that the whole thing was about school-related anxiety and, after a pause, that I'm entirely too self-analytical. I'm not going to try to rebuke the latter point, but the former got me wondering about the reliability of dream-figures to interpret dreams, how I should interpret the interpretation, and a bunch of metaphysical garbage involving logical regresses and meta-meaning and the like. I'm mostly over it now (having got absolutely nowhere), so I decided to write it down.
Actually, I think the whole tornado thing was actually just a morbid wish fulfillment scenario. Though I'm not going to chase one down, seeing one in reality has always been a life goal of mine and probably wrapped up in this is a little deathwish poking around in the back of me noggin.
I was going to close by promising not to turn this thing into a dream journal, but I guess it already is, in its own way.
I and two quite excellent friends of mine sat languidly in porch chairs midway between our porch stoop and a grand urban beach set before us. A sunset, burning orange skies almost threatening in their serenity cast upon a compliant ocean dancing trepidly and eagerly, reflecting and playfully defracting the persistent levelled hues of the setting sun cascading upon its surface. Across this bay a veritable cityscape, its own noxious exhausts no doubt contributing to the exuding brilliance of the dusk. But we are watching an intermediate, an old television propped up showing some crass amalgamation of (as far as I can tell) Gilligan's Island, Casablanca, and a line from Troy I'd picked up several hours earlier ('You shall be my slave, a dancer made to scrub the floors of my palace. And at night...) all seemingly set to the tune of a bad reproduction of Greek tragedy. I close my eyes for a moment to take it in, to try to grasp these vaguely familiar straws. And open again: the sky is brooding, the tangible exuberance of the orange dusk has turned to a impenetrable gray havoc, a foreboding shadow struck across every angle. I see forming in the distance an ominous streak across the ironclad skyscape, what my mind calls (having never seen one before) a tornado. Not just one but a whole family now twisting this way and that in their own chaotic designs, weaving their ways through concrete skyscrapers that seem to accept their presence with looks of sinister accessory. One bears its curves directly towards us and I urge my friends inside. They, reluctant to comply, calmly go through the door. As I'm doing the same I turn around at the threshold and find myself staring the cyclone in the eye. It hits me, and I wake up.
Or so I think. I'm now lying awake in bed. This seems about right. It's a warmly lit but sparsely furnished house, or maybe a condo. Mostly familiar people are humming around. They seem to be packing up to leave somewhere. I find myself thinking about tornadoes. "Does anyone know what the dream-symbol of tornadoes means?" I ask, as if it is something one takes a class on or can look up in an encyclopedia. A good friend of mine, one who has little to do in my mind with either meteorology or psychoanalysis, turns to me and in a friendly but formal fashion informs me, "A tornado. Transient operators beyond your control. An upheaval. A reconfiguration stripping away the material world around you." Then, dropping this tarot card-esque countenance he says "You're probably just worried about losing all your things next May," presumably referring to my impending graduation. The rest of the dream is the commonly strange sort of riff-raff most dreams are seeped in.
Moving down (or up?) a level of abstraction, I do actually wake up and spend a good deal of time thinking about the dream, not because it affected me particularly profoundly, but just that I found it rather interesting and because the beach and storm of the inner dream were beautiful and I wanted to try and maintain an image of them. I tell a roommate about it and she tells me two things: that the dream-interpretation given by my friend is an indication that the whole thing was about school-related anxiety and, after a pause, that I'm entirely too self-analytical. I'm not going to try to rebuke the latter point, but the former got me wondering about the reliability of dream-figures to interpret dreams, how I should interpret the interpretation, and a bunch of metaphysical garbage involving logical regresses and meta-meaning and the like. I'm mostly over it now (having got absolutely nowhere), so I decided to write it down.
Actually, I think the whole tornado thing was actually just a morbid wish fulfillment scenario. Though I'm not going to chase one down, seeing one in reality has always been a life goal of mine and probably wrapped up in this is a little deathwish poking around in the back of me noggin.
I was going to close by promising not to turn this thing into a dream journal, but I guess it already is, in its own way.