Anxiety Dreaming Again

[mbarrick]

Not sure where this stuff is coming from, but I had quite the dream last night.

It started in the house I consider "the house I grew up in", which is the house I lived in from the ages of three through ten. I was as I am now, i.e. grown up, although the house was as it was when I lived there. I was there with Trish. She was dressed in a white cotton shirt and black jeans, and I for no reason was "dressed" in an orange towel as if I had just stepped out of the bath, or perhaps the swimming pool. It was a sunny day, late in the day, and we were walking from the backyard toward the driveway along the side path and there was some guy in the side yard.

The guy, who was sort of a skinny blonde guy with an aquiline nose, had some bone to pick with Trish and I (shades of Louis?) and it quickly degraded into a fist-fight. I beat the living crap out of him on the side lawn and left him lying underneath my old bedroom window. Trish and I then began walking up the street toward town as if this was not an unusual occurrence.

As we approached town where in reality the street I grew up on would have met up with downtown Duncan (in as much as Duncan has a "downtown") the street instead transformed into a whore-infested industrial wasteland not unlike Gastown east of Main and north of Hastings (through which I pass daily on my commute and where I lived for a couple years in a funky live-work studio). At this point it had gotten quite dark.

We went into a crack-mart corner store to get some chocolate bars and after buying them, because this was a regular walk for us and we knew where we were going quite well, we went out the back alley door of the store to take a shortcut through a hole in a fence that let us walk across a well-lit parking lot to the street with the hookers on it (which was the safest path because of the volume of traffic on the street). Unfortunately someone had fixed the fence and put razor-wire along the top so we had to walk back up the alley and walk along a very poorly lit street a block of "the stroll". As we rounded the corner from the dark street to walk up toward the busier hooker street a bunch of motorcycles came up behind us an the guys on them began cat-calling us, mostly with comments about the towel I was wearing.

The motorcycles weren't Harleys and the guys on them weren't biker types. Rather the bikes were more Mad-Max-esque black and battered dirt-bikes and the riders more in keeping with the sort of guys you would find at the Cambie Pub - pretty ordinary bike-courier/college-alternative types. In the dream, however, this was a very bad thing. I told Trish to run and she did, and the motorcycles surrounded me. I started climbing up an electrical pole guy-wire to keep from being clocked by billy-clubs and chains.

Several riders dismounted and began to climb after me and climb a nearby fence to cut off my ascent to the pole. I was to be conscripted into something that was called "The 64-hour Club" which I knew meant that I was going to be expected to commit violent crimes on behalf of this group on pain of death. It was apparent that a number of the people currently surrounding my had been likewise recruited and were not wholly enthusiastic about capturing me.

At this point I realized I was dreaming and therefore no longer subconsciously significant. For what it is worth, once the dream was lucid, I escaped by completing my climb up the guy-wire and making a Jacky-Chan-like leap from the pole to a fire-escape and then going out through the building.

But the lucid part isn't worth anything, it's the rest that has me thinking. I know this is related to the elephant dream and I have an inkling of what's going on here, but no time to write about it right now.

Comments

Dream Interpertation

[logik.livejournal.com]

You have just described the classic homosexual dream...

Obviously, you are gay.

*laugh* - Just teasing. As there is little to no evidence of dreaming symbols having any deep meaning (sorry folks, but no serious study published to date has found significant co-relation between psychologically significant events and dreams. I know that there are millions of people who dissagree, but as Oscar Wilde once wrote, "Although a great number of people may believe a silly thing, it remains a silly thing.")

I suspect that you are having wierd and wild dreams probably 'cause you are eating too close to bed time (*giggle*).

As a wild guess though, just for fun, I sugest the following:

The towel represents "A Towel" - obviously you enjoy using towels after a shower or bath.
Trish represents "Trish" - a person that you have gone for walks with.
The bikers represent your love of the classic 80's film "The Road Warrior"
The ugly streets and crack store represent your desire to buy crack filled chocolate bars.... Mmmmmm... Crack.... Mmmmmmm.

The lucid part it cool though. I usually resort to dangerous brain powers or super powers in my lucid dreams... I like the Jackie Chan thing though.

Re: Dream Interpertation

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

I am of the "making sense of random neurological impulses" school of dreaming. The significance comes from what one does with the random impulses, which I think offer insight to what is on one's mind on a non-random level. I don't buy the idea of Jungian archetypes or anything like that - the interpretations are entirely subjective.

So to a great extent what you say is true. The Mad-Max/Fight-Club-ish imagery does come out of my experience of those movies, the crack-marts (a term I use for the latenight corner stores in Skid Row that "somehow" stay in business despite having nothing on the shelves but expired chips and expired milk) and other Skid Row imagry come from passing through there on a daily basis and having lived there for a few years.

The question of interpretation comes into why those images and experiences rather than some others. I'm not about to pull out some Victorian dream interpretation book and say, "Oh, elephants mean X". Rather I am going to wonder why I am dreaming of beating the crap out of some hawk-nosed punk over, say, boinking Winona Ryder.

Re: Dream Interpertation

[logik.livejournal.com]

I would tend to agree with your approach as it is a rational approach. Sadly though, the studies done to date show little to no significance in the choice of imagery in dreams. It appears to be quite effectivly random. This isn't true for lucid dreaming however, where the choices of actions do tend to reflect the psychological environment and conditions of the person in their waking life.

For what it is worth though, I expect that the prevalence of "down and out" images and the elements of exposure and violence, rather than having sex with Winona Ryder may indicate subtle feelings of "loss of control" that are giving you a tendancy to focus on negative images instead of more upbeat images. Just a guess... Maybe you are a bit stiffled or bored at work?

Me, I quite often dream code. I hate those dreams. I work a 12 hour day of coding, and then I can't even get away from it in my sleep *laugh*. The nice thing about it though, is frequently I get up in the middle of the night with the solution to a problem that I couldn't work through when I was awake... I hammer it out on the keyboard and then go back to bed.

Re: Dream Interpertation

[bitogoth.livejournal.com]

Me, I quite often dream code. I hate those dreams. I work a 12 hour day of coding, and then I can't even get away from it in my sleep *laugh*. The nice thing about it though, is frequently I get up in the middle of the night with the solution to a problem that I couldn't work through when I was awake... I hammer it out on the keyboard and then go back to bed.

i wish my coding dreams were so useful... more often i dream that i am writing a peice of code that no one ever has before, or am making code do something it theorhetically can't do... then i wake up- argh!

for a time i was addicted to tetris and used to have tetris dreams- quelle horreur

[sleeplessknight.livejournal.com]

Wow, weird dream! O_o