Have you ever noticed that sometimes there's a dreamworld continuity that exists only in your dreaming state, that's separate from waking life, like as if it were a separate reality - lived by a different person, such that your waking life knows nothing about it? That is, until some random trigger during your waking day unlocks those memories and the dreamworld continuity lays itself bare to your waking consciousness?
I was reading Cherie's memoir (which is fantastic and highly recommended, by the way), and it got to a point after the end of the Runaways first tour, their first time back home after making it as a band. And there's a part where Cherie talks about going back to her school for a day to stick it to her teacher who always said she'd never amount to anything, and maybe to stay and sit in on some classes, just for the hell of it, knowing that she's a rock star and doesn't need to go to school anymore if she doesn't want to. And that reminded me of a long series of dreams I've had since graduating college and thereby finishing up my schooling years.
I don't remember much in the way of specific details, nor statistics like how many dreams I had or when I had them. All I have is this sensation, and some vague recollections, of multiple dreams that I'd had since graduating college, in which I'd be going back to high school to attend class. And in the dreams, there would be like this faint understanding that I had finished school and didn't need to go anymore, yet at the same time, there was an uncertainty about me being supposed to be there. So I felt like I was going back, when I didn't have to, and there was some anxiety about being too old, or whether I was actually finished, or if I belonged there, or if somebody else would say, on the one hand, I shouldn't be there, or if I left, that I should. And it seemed that with every passing dream school year, I wondered, is that it? Is that the last one? Am I finally done for good now? Or do I have to go back again for another year?
And it seems like all of this, all these thoughts, previously existed on a different plane than my conscious reality. I could be wrong, but I don't remember being consciously aware of having these recurring dreams about going back to high school, yet now that I face them, they seem so very familiar to me, like I am certain that they were there all along. Bizarre.
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This is something I experienced fairly often. I often have successive dreams with a definite continuity which I am mostly only aware of when I am in the dream. This was happening to me even as a toddler.
ReplyDeleteAt first I thought it was an illusion, i.e. the sensation that I had experienced past dreams in the continuity of the current dream was just another attribute of my dream, just like experiencing anything else that isn't real. But through writing about important dreams, as I have at various times in my life, I've come to learn that (at the very least some of) the dream continuities are quite factual indeed.
The creepy thing is that one of my most common dream themes involves going back to school. I've written many blog entries about it (including many I haven't posted/finished).
A recent and rather strong example was where I was going to school, and I would either skip class intentionally or I would wander around in a desperate search for the class I was supposed to be in, but I could never find it, and then I started to have dire anxiety over the fact that I was missing so much class and would fail out of school.
Then when I woke up for a while I still believed it... until I realized that nobody has had the power to fail me out of anything for almost 3 years, and those particular once-pervasive anxieties are as extinct in me as the dinosaurs are on Earth.