The Fox's Secret

In this post I want to share a very short and memorable part of a longer dream that has already faded from memory.  The narrative itself won’t take much time but I think that there is a great deal to unpack from this very brief moment.  Here is the narrative:

I am sitting in the second row of seats in a van.  I am next to the sliding door to the back part of the van and it is already open.  There are two men and at least one young adult/adolescent.  The two men are in the front two seats and one of them is my dad.  I am not sure who the others are.  Both my dad and I get out of the van and I realize we are in a parking lot on the North Side of Pittsburgh.  We are next to a parking garage on our right.  Looking to the left, I see Three Rivers Stadium.  At first this feels normal, but then it occurs to me that Three Rivers Stadium is “no longer there.”  Of course, it IS there, standing right in front of me.  I try to tell my dad that it’s not there and he laughs at the obviously absurd statement.  I say that I mean it shouldn’t be there, that it’s gone, that this has to be a memory or a dream.  He shakes his head in disbelief and tells me to prove it.  There is a breeze blowing.  ”See,” he says.  ”I feel that.  Do you?  Just like a normal breeze?”  And he is right.  Everything looks and feels perfectly real and normal.  There is no way to prove I am dreaming.  The pavement feels solid under my feet, the breeze I can feel on my face and I can turn in every direction and see what’s around me.  A perfectly seamless world without gaps.  I say, “It’ not a breeze, it’s the memory of a breeze.”  Then I look at the parking garage and the bland N1 sign designating what lot it is expands to more letters and symbols and spells out “A fool parks here.”  I remember the fool being important in my dreams and I hold up my hand to cut off something my dad is saying as I go to find the fool.  I go around the corner of the garage and I hear laughter, but it is a woman’s laughter and not what I had expected.  I then hear another woman laughing.  I look up at the higher levels of the garage and I know it’s coming from up there but I can’t see anything.  Then I wake up. Read more »

The previous two entries both involved religious themes and the appearance of divine figures.  I’ve decided to stick with that theme tonight and post a dream that I had in the spring of 2002.   It’s a dream that had major ramifications for my waking as well as my sleeping life.  But I’ll say more about that in the next entry.  As usual, I prefer to post the dream narrative itself, leave it open to the reader’s interpretation, and only then post my own.

One night I got home at four in the morning, having been out drinking again. The first part of the night was filled with those bouts of drunken sleep from which you remember absolutely nothing. When I woke up the first time, it was probably around 9 in the morning. The bedroom window was open slightly, enough to see that it was a very overcast day. There was a gentle rain falling. I can still hear the sound of the rain today. When I went back to sleep, I had a dream that forever changed me, in what ways I’m still not sure. Read more »

Who are you?

Who am I?

I finally got ahold of that trickster figure when he showed up in my dreams for the third time in a month’s time.  I wanted to know who he was.  I wanted to know what he was doing in my dreams.  And I thought the best way to find out would be to ask him and demand an answer.  But my question only caused him to laugh hysterically.  “I’m you,” he said to me, and then changed form two more times.  Is he me in every form?  Weird Al the hospice doctor, The Joker as circus trapeze act, a clown with oversized shoes running from a tidal wave, my college friend Darius, a hot girl in revealing clothing?  Can these all be me?

How can they not be?  Each dream took place inside my head.  Each character you encounter in a dream is generated by your own mind.  How can they not be you?  And yet…they certainly don’t feel like they’re you.  Or me.  Or…this is getting confusing.  But maybe it should be confusing.  After all, have you ever stopped to ask yourself why it is you can ask a character in a dream something, not know how they are going to answer, and then listen to their answer?  If that character is also you, how can it be possible that you can ask a question to which you do not have an answer, and then the dream character replies with an answer that you did not know until he spoke it?

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When you start dreaming about the same person, place or event over and over again, it really starts to get your attention.  In less than a month, I encountered a figure in my dreams that I felt was the same character in each instance, despite the fact that it appeared in slightly altered ways each time.  I have already described the first two dreams in which I encountered the archetypal figure of The Fool, the Trickster or the Joker here and here.

This dream marked a real turning point.  In the first two dreams in which I encountered this trickster figure, I ended up afraid, panicked and wanted desperately to escape.  In this third dream, however, I finally summoned the courage to confront the danger, run toward the trickster and confront him directly.  While this could represent some kind of psychological breakthrough, I would find that the trickster would ultimately remain ever so frustratingly out of reach as something I could confront but could not yet fully comprehend.  I will write more on the possible meaning of the dream later, but for now I want to concentrate on describing the dream as it happened:

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This entry marks the first time since launching the site that I will have the opportunity to discuss a dream that I just had.  And when I say I just had it, I mean that I just woke up in bed not more than ten minutes ago.  This is a brand new, oven fresh dream hot off the presses.

As I describe the dream, I’ll also be commenting (in parentheses so that you can read the narrative uninterrupted first, then read the process description later if you would like) on the process of recounting a dream.  Even a dream that feels new and fresh in the mind can start to dart out of your grasp like a wet fish flopping with all of its might to get back in the water.  Often times it is impossible to remember the exact order of events, and in fact, part of the “remembering” is actually an exercise in imposing some kind of order and continuity to them.  If you remember my first entry on the science of dreaming, this should be no surprise due to the low activity in short term memory areas of the brain.

One surprise that was in store for me in this dream, however, was the fact that it became lucid toward the end.  A “lucid dream” is one in which the dreamer becomes aware that he or she is dreaming and yet still remains asleep.  This is actually a fascinating way to explore your own mind and what it means to have consciousness.  It can also be a lot of fun–although as it turned out in this dream, it wasn’t.  So sit back and relax and try to make sense of the dream that follows, which I have dubbed “The Grocery Store Get Out”!

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