5/10/2006

in

To sleep, perchance to dream

Joyce Faulkner

I'm a dreamer - no, not the pie in the sky, "I'm gonna reach the top" kind of dreamer. I mean, I go to bed at night just to enjoy the movies that flash across the screen inside my eyelids. Some are entertaining. Some are terrifying. Some are downright boring. Many are puzzling.  
  
Sometimes my dreams have physical consequences. Once I dreamed I was stumbling down a corridor and stumped my toe. When I woke up, there was a chip in my newly pedicured toe nail. One night I kicked Osama bin Laden and woke up with an ugly bruise on my shin. Another time, I wrestled Larry King for a peacock feather all night long and was too tired to go to work the next morning.  
  
I often dream I'm gliding across the sky with my arms extended - and then that pleasant sensation turns to terror as I plummet into an abyss that looks like Mick Jagger's mouth - and the abyss chews me up. Shudder. Once, I awakened, sure that someone was breathing on my neck - only to find that I was still sleeping, and I couldn't tell if the wet inhalations and exhalations were real or not. I tried to scream but no sound would come out of my throat. I'm not sure if there really was no sound or if I was only dreaming there was no sound. My husband says I make all kinds of noises when I'm sleeping, so who knows?  
  
The most horrifying nightmares were when I was a kid, and I dreamed over and over again that I was watching my grandfather sleep in a box. When I was thirteen, I thought of that dream when I stood in front of his coffin after he'd been murdered. In another one, I dreamed I was in a building that I'd designed - and it was slowly coming apart like a house of cards. I was desperate to fix it...and filled with the guilty suspicion that I'd made a mistake somewhere. I woke up with greater empathy for the designer of the Titanic.  
  
Then there's the famous dream all students have - I wake up and realize that I've forgotten to go to class all semester long, and now I have to take a test, and I don't have a clue what the class was about. Or the alternative terror, I dream I wake up to discover I'm late for a test, but I'm not sure if I'm awake and it's really late, or if I'm still asleep dreaming that it's late. The last time I went to school that it mattered was more than fifteen years ago, but I still have those dad-gummed dreams. I also have the one where my teeth are soft and all there is to eat is steak. And the one where I'm wearing a low cut dress and the legs of the chair I'm sitting on are made of PlayDoh and I'm slowly sinking into the floor and the man sitting next to me (who looks just like Rush Limbaugh) is towering higher and higher over me - and every time he looks down at me he drops peas into my cleavage. Or the one where there's a snake living in the toilet and it comes out at night and I can hear its scales scraping across the tile floor - and then suddenly the shower comes on. Or the one where a wolf who lives under my bed reads "To Kill a Mockingbird" in a gruff snarling tone that keeps me awake all night.  
  
Sometimes other people's dreams are stranger than my own. For example, my daughter says that she dreams that she's careening down a highway, and none of the controls on the car work. My husband dreams that he's backing a Volvo down an endless mountain trail - without brakes. I maintain that that's how he drives anyway - but that's a different shriek. Years ago, when we were dating, he entertained me for an evening telling me about how he dreamed he was a duck. He denies it now. Every once in a while I think he might really have been a duck in an earlier life. He denies that too.  
  
There are times I can't sleep for fear the wolf under the bed will go after the duck snoring beside me. Or was that something I dreamed while on Tylenol PM?