dreams

I've been having weird ones lately. For most of my life, I haven't been able to remember any of my dreams, but the past year has seen an increase in my ability to retain them.

The other night I dreamed I walked into a doctor's office down the street from the house in which I grew up, only to find it not a doctor's office but a house, and it was freshly abandoned, and there was a tiny baby in it, asleep and limp and dying of hunger. Throughout the remainder of the dream I was coping with all sorts of small and sudden calamities with the baby slumped across my shoulder, all the while trying to keep him from falling asleep, loving the heavy trusting warmth of him, and attempting to make him a bottle.

Last night I dreamed there were a lot of people at my apartment, and we were all trying to agree on a movie while I was apologizing for how much I loved watching previews, and midway through it a couple of my friends got hungry, so I took them to Jimmy John's for subs. I really, really wanted one particular sub, but when we got there we found that the entire joint had been rearranged and the menu changed entirely, and what I wanted was no longer available unless by special request, and I couldn't remember what it was called, and I was anxious and upset and angry, while my friends were really excited by the new salad bar. Then we got back to my apartment and everybody else was hungry, so I got ready to take them to Jimmy John's, too, and then suddenly I was in a dark forest hiding from them all, and from someone else who wanted to kill me, and the trees were charred and dead, and the leaves were curled and huge and dead and flapping against each other in the breeze and making loud dead noises -- "bones on leather," I thought, and knocked a bunch of them to the ground, trying to shut them up.

Weird. The Dream Moods website wasn't entirely helpful in interpreting -- the only point of interest was when it said that starving babies represent some vulnerable, dependent part of the dreaming subject that is in need of immediate attention. (I also think it represents how much I miss holding babies.) As for the rest -- well, dead leaves represent loss, forests are the unconscious, etc., and I'm taking the whole Jimmy John's thing to symbolize how much I hate change, and how much of it I've been going through in the last year, which would account for my existential exhaustion lately.

Sum-up: Me tired. But there's nothing to do but keep on, and keep trying to carve out the space I need to nurture those aspects of myself that haven't been getting enough breathing room -- most particularly my learning and my writing. I have plans for these. Exciting ones. Hopefully the fall will see a calming down, a rejuvenation, and a regenesis.