dreams

a quiet night

I awoke this morning knowing I had dreamt but unable to hold on to any image or feeling.

Race Committee

Last night, a long series of dreams, most of which I lost before waking at about 4 am.  But I drifted back to sleep and had a final dream that involved running a sailboat race.  I came on the scene in the middle of the the starting sequence after two of three classes had started.  I postponed the start of the last class because of a 180 degree windshift I saw coming.  We had to move the starting line.  One end of the line was a log.  I had to dig a hole in pine-needle covered soil to re-set that end.  The starting line was then at the top of a hill on a lawn with tall pines on one side. It was much like the Laughlin place near where I grew up.  I was using my laptop as a timer - it included a little video of a man counting off the seconds.  By the time of the start, my committee and I were in the doorway of a whitewashed building.  The man firing the starting gun foolishly fired it inside the room, to my disapproval.  Outside the doorway was a parking lot full of cars.  I was wondering how the boats would get between them.  Then the alarm awoke me...

Success

From last night I remember only fragments, although, like many dreams that seem fragmentary on waking, there was no sensation of discontinuity during the dream.  Some elements I remember: 

Stainless flatware, someone was collecting it.  I had a handful, I dropped a knife (I thought) into a trash can, but couldn't find it. 

There was something about retired maxi boats as power sources.

Someone made an adjustment to something in my mouth - not teeth exactly, but some device - tightening things up...   Joe S. was somehow part of it.  He had teeth in stalled in artificial gums that looked like granite but were some kind of plastic, perhaps corian.

At the end there was a big happening at my sail loft, a video presentation of some kind.  Many people were there sitting around tables, including a some of my competitors.  It was somehow a great success to have so many people there and have my competitors take that in.  The PA speakers for the presentation weren't working in the back, but that wasn't a problem.  It wasn't the video that was important, but the crowd.

There was music involved.  Backstage were a couple of electric guitars and an electric bass. No one was playing them, but there was someone there who gently took away a guitar when I touched it.

Baseball glove

Last night , I had two sets of dreams interrupted by a waking spell

The first involved a group of people on some kind of common mission or perhaps competition.  Each made independent progress.  The point seemed to be that success was dependent on balancing the progress in the first half of the (day's) journey with the second half.  Progress was measured by lots of grey rock - not travelled over but passed by, like sailing past cliffs.  Each participant came to a meeting with a portfolio of progress, pictures of grey rock that looked like graphs.  The balancing might have had something to do with the areas under each part of the graph.

The second was a preparation dream, getting prepared to go someplace.  The big item that needed to be taken care of was sewing my old baseball glove - restitching the piece that goes between the thumb and forefinger, the leather webbing that keeps the ball from getting through that gap , which had come loose.  Of course, I don't have an old baseball glove, but this glove was fairly vivid, a small, kids' size one of soft, yellow leather.  It needed some other repairs too, which I got done, sewing with tough clear monofilament like thread, but putting the webbing back in was the important part, and, of course, I was always being interupted, so that it never got done.  The glove wasn't for my own use, but, I think, for my wife's, although she wasn't present in the dream.  I was also doing preparation work on other things that were keeping me from the glove; fixing a sewing machine and attaching something to one of the vans we were going to use to tow our boats, so I guess we were going to a regatta.  Where we were going may have shifted during the dream, as those things do, but the importance of the glove never diminished.

Flying

I have had dreams of flying in the past.  Some are dreams of effortlessly floating without control or volition.

But some are particularly vivid.  In these dreams, the act of flying is an act of will, requiring tremendous effort and concentration.  I know that in the past I have been able to exercise my will sufficiently to succeed in flying wherever I want.  But in these dreams, I feel I have forgotten how to do it, like forgetting how to flex a particular muscle or being unable to strengthen my will sufficiently to get off the ground. 

What is this...?

What am I trying to do here?  I guess that's a question it's important to ask before starting a blog.  It's a little different than just jotting stuff down in a word file somewhere on your hard drive.  Even though I have told no one that I'm doing this and I'm not sure I ever will, people may stumble upon it. 

I have often wondered if my life would change in any important ways if I paid more attention to my dreams.  I guess I started thinking about dreams many years ago when I first read Carlos Castenada.  In his exposition of the Yaqui way of knowledge, becoming a deliberate actor in your dreams - willing yourself to dream of a certain place or person - is a path to power.

Some dreams are much more vivid than others - seem to have purpose and direction that are quite relevant.  For instance, I recently dreamed of working on an important and powerful scheme of some kind (I'm not sure just what it was), but I knew I was creating a paper trail, actually, a pile of papers on my desk, that was going to somehow interfere with the schemes success.  This was very vivid and very much like the pile of papers I have let accumulate on my desk over the past couple of months - things I know I have to deal with, but keep putting off.

I hope that by committing myself to record dreams here, that I will get better at remembering them and noting their relevance to my life.  They may even give some kind of early warning to problems looming ahead.

I am not going to promise that everything that appears here will be an accurate report of what occurred during last night's sleep.  Most will be, but some might not be.  Caveat emptor.  However, everything here will be the fevered creation of my own brain.

Drugs

Last night a series of images.  Pill bottles and boxes of prescription drugs but with the knowledge that some fraction was missing.  Vioxx?  I don't know.

here we go...

this weblog is to be a record of dreams.