Friday, May 07, 2004

My head is running around on me!

Ever have some sort of really strong emotion in a dream, and then it carried over into your waking life?

When I was in college I had this dream that involved this girl I knew. And no, it wasn't a sex dream, you pervs. Get your minds out of the gutter. Anyway, this girl was not a particularly close friend of mine... She was a couple of years younger, and was in a campus group I was running at the time. I would have classified her as an "aquaintance" at best. Not someone I hung out with, not someone I knew all that well, and frankly, not really somebody I gave a lot of thought to.

Then I had this dream. It was me and her, on the run from some unseen villian or villians. And we were in love. And she was having my baby.

In the dream, my love for her and for the child she was carrying was completely and totally real. She was the love of my life, and we were starting a family together. The plot of the dream is really unimportant. I don't even remember if we got away from whoever was pursuing us. The thing was, I woke up with all those feelings of love and connection still ringing around in my head.

Does this ever happen to you???

The next time I saw this girl was so weird. In real life we were two people who barely knew each other. In my head we had been in love. She was like a psychic ex-girlfriend. Every time I looked at her, I saw her pregnant with our baby. And I wanted to reach out and hold her, because we had practicaly been married.

So, so, so strange. That lingering dream-feeling always fades out, the same way that it becomes harder and harder to remember the plot of a dream you had. I knew if I played it cool, eventually the feelings I had for her would go away. And they did. It took 3 weeks, but eventually, everything was back to normal. When I was around her, I saw only this girl I kind of knew. When I spoke with her, I felt only the vague friendship we had always had. All that love, all those feelings, our unborn child, all slipped back down into whatever subconcious place they had come from.

How is it that the emotions we feel in our dream-time can break into the waking world like that? I had a girlfriend several years ago who would dream that I had done something thoughtless to her, like kissed another girl, or called her a name or something, and when she woke up, she would stay mad at me for the rest of the day. I'd spend the whole day paying for something I had never actually done.

Sometimes I get the feeling that my brain is like an unruly roomate - someone I only share my skull with. Some days he's quiet and lets me pick what chanel to watch, and other days he plays his music really loud and stinks up the place with his cooking. Some days I get to drive, and somedays he takes the wheel and careens us headlong down some dark, unexplored alley - some place I never would have gone on my own.

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