When I crawl into bed at night and turn out the lights I don't expect to dream, so when I do I wake up with a scream on my lips and remember every detail and I'm left wondering what did it all mean.
The first significant dream that I can remember having was when I was a child, maybe 5 years old, and we lived in an old farmhouse in Warriors Mark, PA. My bedroom was right off the top of a great staircase.
In my dream I got out of bed, my long curly hair per usual was in my face and disheveled and I walked over to the top of the stairs and looked down at the bottom into the dark and from the dark emerged a ghostly image similar to this, but way less cute.
In its amorphous white, cloudy left hand was my mom's scissors (the orange handled ones that we weren't allowed to use and we would be in trouble if we did). This apparition slowly rose up the stairs towards me and I ran back to my room and closed the door. That was it. That was all the dream consisted of.
Shortly after this dream experience, we moved. At the new place, I took a pair of scissors and yes, cut my own hair and walked into the kitchen where my mom and aunts were, as if I hadn't. I don't remember the punishment, but I can still see that apparition coming towards me from the dark below.
During my adolescent years, there was a lot chaos and insanity and just so much going on all of the time. Being uprooted and moving back and forth constantly until finally going to Milton Hershey School where I was afforded some stability. During this time I have no significant memories of any specific dream, but I remember my deceased grandmother always appeared in the background of them dressed as a cop. Kind of patrolling my psyche to make me feel safe I guess.
Skipping forward to college. Just before I finally got around to graduating, I had a dream that I was holding a styrofoam bowl from the cafeteria in my hands at my mouth and my teeth fell out into it. The teeth just floated and bobbed up and down in the blood. It was a gory cereal, but wasn't a violent mess. It was as though I was just holding a normal bowl of cereal.
As I look back, I was about to graduate, I had never been out on my own and had been worried about all of the changes. These organized blocks of life, my teeth, were shedding in a very gross way.
Now as an adult, as I went through many obstacles and hoops I had been dreamless up until just over a year or two ago. I was changing everything. Chucking my settled life as I knew it into the wind and setting back out into the unknown. I was making difficult decisions and then acting on those decisions to affect change.
In the dream, I am walking uphill on a lonely overgrown logging road in the middle of a forest and on my right there is a brick retaining wall kind of like this:
Bricks are missing and in those holes sit the skulls of snakes. I even reach out and pick one up and put it back.
As I walk up the road, a fuzzy bear begins walking with me and in a tunnel in the wall on my right, slitering along with us, was a very large snake. You could see its black and gray speckled body through the holes behind the snake skulls.
The brickwall ends by meeting the road at the top of the hill. There the bear continues walking forward on the road into the deeper forest and I stop and turn. At my feet, the giant snake has also turned around, remaining in its tunnel, slithering back down the road we just walked up.
I don't follow the bear on its journey and walk along the top of the brickwall, above the snake tunnel and skulls, back down the hill and this is where the dream ends.
I have had the dream several times, always starting at the bottom of the hill and I make my way up to the top. Once, the bear has stopped to wave for me to follow but I didn't go. Once, there was a small party with stringed instruments playing and I walked off the path to join them.
I still don't know what it meant and I may never know. I do know that at the time I was having it, I felt like I was stuck in a loop. I don't feel that so much anymore, but I'm not sure which path I'm on at this point either.
I also now realize that the one constant that links all of these dreams together is fear and these fear laden dreams are the only dreams that I have had and have stood out over time.
So hopefully, it will be a long time before I wake up with another scream on my lips and some wacky dream to analyze for months or years to come.
Comments