What Dreams May Come

Sometimes, I get to have the greatest dreams. It's a sign to me that I'm actually finishing the job of rest if I get to have really elaborate and interesting dreams. Recently, I've been staying up late and getting up early, and cutting out my REM sleep. So, today, I took a really good nap, and had the greatest dream in ages.

I was driving around a version of my neighborhood on a night much like the ones we've been having recently--wet and rainy. I live in an old area that is just stuffed full of old Victorian behemoth houses, built for families with 10 children and 20 live in servants. For many years, most of these houses were no longer fashionable, and were donated to charitable organizations or were carved up into rooming houses and tiny apartments. Over the last 20-30 years, however, many many of them have been reclaimed into single family homes (more or less--how do you classify live-in nanny quarters?)

In my dream, many of them were even bigger than in real life, and were being equipped with showy awnings and extremely dramatic lighting. And three of these dream houses were open as historic re-enactment sites, and I was touring them as they presented "Victorian New Year's Day Open Houses."

So, I walked in the front doorway and marvelled over the beautifully carved oak panelling and trim. To the right were the family's rooms, decorated with carved furniture, velvet upholstery, fine china table settings, elegant stained glass windows, the whole Victorian mise-en-scene. (Yes, I looked at each one of these things in my dream--these are very detailed dreams I have.)

To the left were the "working rooms," the butler's office, the kitchens, the servant's quarters, etc., all of which had much more plain furnishings and architectural detail. Since this was the site of re-enactment, there were also actual modern restrooms, as well as dressing rooms for the actors playing "The Family" and "The Servants." Some of the actors were changing shifts as I toured the house, so I found myself keeping track of where I had seen some of the people before--wasn't that the Cook from the kitchen that I was seeing up on the third floor?

Interestingly enough, not only was I dreaming about sights and sounds and actors and furnishing and all the other tourists going through the house with me, but I also was dreaming in textures. Up in the women servant's dormitory, there were a couple of single beds, and one large mattress on the floor for the youngest servants. When I lay down on it, I discovered that it was filled with dried corn kernels. I even picked up the corner of the mattress to feel the individual kernels, and I even could smell the slight popcorn scent of the kernels that had been warmed for the night.

Where did this all come from? There was an actor playing the "Father" who interacted with me as if I was one of his daughter's friends, and we talked about a party she and I were going to be attending later. There was a invalid "Grandmother" who had an enormous four-poster bed with a velvet quilt on it. I looked out one of the windows, to see another large house which had a long line of people in the front waiting to get in for the "open house." The houses backed up on something vaguely "municipal"--a large chain link fence and really bright lights, as if it were a water treatment facility or city pool or something that would never have been there when the area was fashionable, but could well have been placed their when the houses were run down and the property values had tanked.

There is just so damn much detail, and I don't know why I dream so extravagantly. On line dream analysis doesn't help much--some things represent "intellect" or "how you present yourself"--but when there is just so much stuff in my dreams, it's really hard to work out anything about what going on inside my head.

The one thing I am certain of--dreams about being in a bathroom usually mean I have to wake up and go pee. I have yet to find a "dream analysis" work that gets that literal.