I've always had vivid dreams, and usually not very pleasant dreams, though not necessarily nightmares. My dreams, at least from about the age of twenty or so, were (and are) almost exclusively variations on one particular theme: that there is something unaccomplished in my life, something undone, something which I am in the process of doing but cannot complete, for whatever reason. The emotions I experience in my dreams are always of a patently negative quality: frustration, dread, isolation, alienation, and an over-bearing sense of my own hopeless incompetence.
Nothing difficult here: I graduated high school a year later than I was supposed to, due of a lack of credits, and also, more truthfully, due to a lack of desire to move on and become an adult. I was a late-starter (or never-starter) in almost everything I can think of. I didn't get a driver's license until I was twice the legal driving age. Whatever serious romantic relationships I had were undertaken when I was well into my twenties, though I had had a fair amount of fly-by-night encounters, at the usual stages, in the usual places. My dreams of being a musician have vanished, and my desire to make something of myself as a poet is on the wane.
So here I am, at forty, in fairly decent health, as far as I know. I'm happily married, the father of two boys, and have been steadily employed since 1989. I live close to my sister and my parents, with whom I have a warm and positive relationship; but over the past few months my dreams have become even drearier than before, and they are still nothing more than re-castings of the same old theme of failure and incompetence. I still dream, for instance, that I am in high school, trudging through yet another year. Except I'm not a teen in these dreams, I'm an adult: my current self, a forty year old senior who has yet to graduate. I can't find my way through the building. I have only a vague sense of where I am supposed to be, but no idea how to get there. The school becomes a labyrinth: dark, complex, and completely unfamiliar. I miss all my classes, wander around lost, speak to no one because they don't acknowledge me. I wake with an intense feeling of shame and regret.
Another variation of this tired theme is a kind of lost traveller dream. I am in a town or city somewhere, but the environment and the people are completely strange to me. I am with them, so I feel I should know them, but I don't. I have an overwhelming desire to go home, but have absolutely no idea how to go about getting there. Sometimes I'm walking. I end up at night going down some road which I feel is vaguely familiar: usually a road in upstate New York where I grew up. I feel I am getting a sense of where I am, but wind up utterly lost as whatever familiarity I sense in where I am dissipates, engulfed in darkness, to the point where I can see almost nothing at all.
I always thought that this dream was due to the fact that I never drove until I was well into adulthood, and always felt a definite lack of freedom of mobility: the queerness of the dream was certainly rooted in what were for a considerable time very real fears and concerns; but oddly enough, even though I have been driving for ten years now, these types of dreams occur just as frequently as they always did. Nothing changes in the dream except that I am in a car. Unfortunately, I have little or no control of the vehicle, and usually the headlights don't work. I find myself speeding down those same vaguely familiar roads, with trees looming in from either side. It's very dark, and I am driving blindly, recklessly. Hopelessly lost. Occasionally I find myself on a highway, desperately trying to figure out how to get home. I rise to the crest of a hill and things seem hopeful and familiar to me, but as I drive on the environment changes and I am god-knows where. I've lived in Arizona since 1989, and have done all my driving here, and yet I dream exclusively of the rural north-east where I grew up: mountains, trees, quaint old towns. My current family is hardly ever with me in these dreams. I am still the fearful and solitary person I was as a teenager.
Sometimes, in these lost traveller dreams, I actually do get home, but home is not home anymore (*smacks forehead*). The trailer park where I lived until I was twelve is bizarre and strange, full of strangers. The trailer I lived in is someone else's home, and as I go through it I realize too late that I've made a mistake, and wind up hiding somewhere while the people who presently live there come home. I feel like a criminal, as well as lost, abandoned, and utterly desolate. I sneak through the trailer, which becomes a giant house with empty rooms and long hallways, crooked stairwells, trying to find a way to escape; but the darkness creeps in until I can barely make my way. I stumble through vacant rooms, up and down stairs, through more vacant rooms, trying to find a door which apparently doesn't exist.
And this is often a dream in itself, without the lost-traveller preamble. I am home, usually in the house my family and I lived in in Mountainville, NY, from 1977-1988. There are "normal" moments, when I am with my brother or sister, or my parents, but these moments are fleeting. Soon enough I am by myself. Everyone else has gone out. The television pops off, the lights go out. I stumble around, fishing under lampshades, turning switches to no avail. None of the lights in any of the rooms will work. In reality, I would assume that the power had gone out, but in these dreams I fail to make the connection. In the dreams, I am sure that the problem is simply that everything has failed at precisely the same time. The television has simply broken: all of the lightbulbs in all of the rooms have given up the ghost, simultaneously. I feel a terrible sense of some malevolent presence. Something is doing this to me. It isn't just bad luck. It's being done on purpose. And every time I have this dream I am conscious of the same thoughts: this is it. This time it's for real. It's not a dream. It's really happening this time. Naturally these dream-thoughts eventually convince me that I am, in fact, dreaming, at which time I awake. I suppose I must have this dream at least three times a month, if not more. When I wake, it takes me some time to orient myself to the present time, to the present place. It might take me several seconds to recall that I have a wife and children, and that my brother and sister, my parents, are not actually under the same roof as I am.
* * *
Two nights ago (on the very night I wrote the above), I had a version of this "dark house" dream, but this time I was in a huge hotel. Of course, it wasn't a hotel at first. I think it may have started out as my old high school, and the beginning of the dream, which I have only a vague recollection of, might have been something along the lines of the "adult student" dream. The part of the dream which I vividly remember took place when the building had become a giant hotel. I was with my first family, I believe, but somehow I wound up becoming separated from them. I was in a hotel room alone, and naturally, everything began to become engulfed in darkness. There was a television on, as there almost always in these types of dreams, and this was giving what appeared to be the only light. I ventured out into the corridor, and wandered around some, but everything was so quiet, lifeless, and dark that I quickly went back into the room I was occupying, with the typical feelings of abandonment, isolation, and fear.
What was different about this dream was the fact that I knew what was afoot, and decided early on not to venture too far. I must have been conscious inside the dream that I wouldn't be able to find anyone or make my way, perhaps because I had only a few hours before been discussing this dream-darkness and it was fresh in my mind. I believe that I woke fairly quickly after realizing that I wasn't going to get anywhere or find anyone. Interesting.
Here's a poem-like item I wrote on the subject of my dreams:
SELF INTERVIEW
I.
Open the curtains, darkness, flip switches,
darkness, darkness so thick it hurts
there. In that here. An abyss.
You stumble blindly through the house
you grew up in. Yes. Always.
But you left years ago. Did you feel
No. I never felt completely secure there.
Alright, ask. The cause of all that?
How many times can I say it, yes yes yes.
Confined, lazy. All of those,
all at once. Absolutely no reason. But you
Absolutely no reason, because I could have
changed everything. I had no strength.
Now look out the window to the left
past the casements which I mentioned
many times. Old hunting cabin Dad
made over, no closets, frames put up
but never finished, had my own bed,
double wide. You were about to describe
the window. Not describe. Look out of.
Trees with soldiers in them. Remember now
these are dreams. My brother and I
would lay on the bed with invisible rifles
and pick them off, one by one they'd drop
thump thump on the ground, roll down
the slope of the hill like boulders.
You killed them. They weren't really there.
But in the dreams I have now, those trees
are dark and breed darkness, multiply
and weave darkness upon darkness,
in the winds outside the window they sway,
like monsters. Leviathans. Sure, I like that.
Behemoths, more like, land-locked.
But it's every night or every other.
The family is out, the cars are gone.
It's night time. Bang. Black-out. Always
the same. Silver horn of panic. Bile
in the throat. No lights. Paw under shades,
mildewy shades, can't find the switch.
Relax. Can't. It's always the same. TV
pops off, zoomph, black. No lights. I know
the power goes out, but in the dreams
I don't realize. I mean I don't make
the connection. It's not that the power
is out, it's that all the bulbs have given
up the ghost at once. Just my luck
kind of thoughts. You feel persecuted?
Victim of bad luck? Last one. Not so first.
Bad luck, bad juju. Or haunted? God yes.
You know I don't believe in the preternatural.
Not at all? No. But I'm afraid of ghosts.
Hear me out. I didn't mean to laugh.
II.
Towns I've never seen, on the bright edges
of cities no maps take note of. Gothams.
But these are real towns, full of teens
in convertibles tearing down boulevards,
not the teens I knew, but I'm stuck with them.
Handsome devils all, with perfect girls,
never lost, never abandoned. How do you
know they are not the ones you went with?
I don't recognize them, and I don't like them.
Can we move on? No. Like I said, cruising.
Finding parties to which I'm not invited.
Finding a girl. Losing the girl. Chasing her
through labyrinths, crowds always smothering her,
snuffing her like a taper. I found my wife kneeling
by a divan, giving some quarterback
a hand-job. About eight times my size it was, in
her tiny hand, tattooed, with buttons, levers,
bells and whistles. I'd been given the standard
issue. She seemed delighted. Who wouldn't be?
Waterfall. Pardon? Waterfall. Lights on a hill
in a ring, a sheer drop, tree roots hanging,
and a waterfall. They climbed through it,
brave, undaunted. I couldn't go through. I
could never get to the other side. Slopes. Floors
sloped. Driveways at impossible angles,
red-tiled floors I'm slated to mop, steep. Water
related to loss? Water related to inadequacy?
Of course. I'm afraid of water. I can't swim.
Tidal waves, submarines, collossal vessels,
everyone's smiling. A day at the fucking beach.
Tanned, smiling. When my toes can't touch bottom
I'm a dead man. And then they dive:
From cliffs to slender uprising columns
of stone. They somersault, swandive, jack-knife,
hundreds of feet, and always land upright, dead-
center. Balance, no worries. Turn and dive a hundred
feet lower, onto a narrower platform. Then they
look up dot-size and beckon with peachy arms.
They don't understand your fear? No, and
why should they? It's so damned easy for them.
III.
Looked for C-wing, but wound up
in cellars, or out side doors I never knew
were there. That were not there.
Rows of blue lockers went on and on
ad infinitum, an illusion, done with mirrors.
How would I find mine, nothing
I had was there, I'd long since forgotten
the combinations. A pink flimsy paper
with my classes clutched in hand,
no books. No familiar faces.
Hallways sloped like irregular hills
and at their mysterious ends small white
holes of light, mold, rot, dead teachers.
Biology lab, test tubes, bunson burners,
students I've seen full grown at gas-stations.
C-wing senior homeroom, for the thousandth
time, elusive door and flag and book stink.
No I have not done the assignment. I did not
know of the assignment. Let's go back to the
cellars was it? Bathrooms, but deep down,
low ceilings, stools with floaties, paper
wadded in corners. No stall doors and where
there are doors they don't function, won't lock.
The place is usually the same, not much
changes, and it's not so much fear as shame.
Where is that goddamm room, the seven
or eight searches between bells. Mile-long
corridors boiling with impossible girls.
In the back of my dreaming mind I think
I still don't give a damn, can't find the door.
Nothing difficult here: I graduated high school a year later than I was supposed to, due of a lack of credits, and also, more truthfully, due to a lack of desire to move on and become an adult. I was a late-starter (or never-starter) in almost everything I can think of. I didn't get a driver's license until I was twice the legal driving age. Whatever serious romantic relationships I had were undertaken when I was well into my twenties, though I had had a fair amount of fly-by-night encounters, at the usual stages, in the usual places. My dreams of being a musician have vanished, and my desire to make something of myself as a poet is on the wane.
So here I am, at forty, in fairly decent health, as far as I know. I'm happily married, the father of two boys, and have been steadily employed since 1989. I live close to my sister and my parents, with whom I have a warm and positive relationship; but over the past few months my dreams have become even drearier than before, and they are still nothing more than re-castings of the same old theme of failure and incompetence. I still dream, for instance, that I am in high school, trudging through yet another year. Except I'm not a teen in these dreams, I'm an adult: my current self, a forty year old senior who has yet to graduate. I can't find my way through the building. I have only a vague sense of where I am supposed to be, but no idea how to get there. The school becomes a labyrinth: dark, complex, and completely unfamiliar. I miss all my classes, wander around lost, speak to no one because they don't acknowledge me. I wake with an intense feeling of shame and regret.
Another variation of this tired theme is a kind of lost traveller dream. I am in a town or city somewhere, but the environment and the people are completely strange to me. I am with them, so I feel I should know them, but I don't. I have an overwhelming desire to go home, but have absolutely no idea how to go about getting there. Sometimes I'm walking. I end up at night going down some road which I feel is vaguely familiar: usually a road in upstate New York where I grew up. I feel I am getting a sense of where I am, but wind up utterly lost as whatever familiarity I sense in where I am dissipates, engulfed in darkness, to the point where I can see almost nothing at all.
I always thought that this dream was due to the fact that I never drove until I was well into adulthood, and always felt a definite lack of freedom of mobility: the queerness of the dream was certainly rooted in what were for a considerable time very real fears and concerns; but oddly enough, even though I have been driving for ten years now, these types of dreams occur just as frequently as they always did. Nothing changes in the dream except that I am in a car. Unfortunately, I have little or no control of the vehicle, and usually the headlights don't work. I find myself speeding down those same vaguely familiar roads, with trees looming in from either side. It's very dark, and I am driving blindly, recklessly. Hopelessly lost. Occasionally I find myself on a highway, desperately trying to figure out how to get home. I rise to the crest of a hill and things seem hopeful and familiar to me, but as I drive on the environment changes and I am god-knows where. I've lived in Arizona since 1989, and have done all my driving here, and yet I dream exclusively of the rural north-east where I grew up: mountains, trees, quaint old towns. My current family is hardly ever with me in these dreams. I am still the fearful and solitary person I was as a teenager.
Sometimes, in these lost traveller dreams, I actually do get home, but home is not home anymore (*smacks forehead*). The trailer park where I lived until I was twelve is bizarre and strange, full of strangers. The trailer I lived in is someone else's home, and as I go through it I realize too late that I've made a mistake, and wind up hiding somewhere while the people who presently live there come home. I feel like a criminal, as well as lost, abandoned, and utterly desolate. I sneak through the trailer, which becomes a giant house with empty rooms and long hallways, crooked stairwells, trying to find a way to escape; but the darkness creeps in until I can barely make my way. I stumble through vacant rooms, up and down stairs, through more vacant rooms, trying to find a door which apparently doesn't exist.
And this is often a dream in itself, without the lost-traveller preamble. I am home, usually in the house my family and I lived in in Mountainville, NY, from 1977-1988. There are "normal" moments, when I am with my brother or sister, or my parents, but these moments are fleeting. Soon enough I am by myself. Everyone else has gone out. The television pops off, the lights go out. I stumble around, fishing under lampshades, turning switches to no avail. None of the lights in any of the rooms will work. In reality, I would assume that the power had gone out, but in these dreams I fail to make the connection. In the dreams, I am sure that the problem is simply that everything has failed at precisely the same time. The television has simply broken: all of the lightbulbs in all of the rooms have given up the ghost, simultaneously. I feel a terrible sense of some malevolent presence. Something is doing this to me. It isn't just bad luck. It's being done on purpose. And every time I have this dream I am conscious of the same thoughts: this is it. This time it's for real. It's not a dream. It's really happening this time. Naturally these dream-thoughts eventually convince me that I am, in fact, dreaming, at which time I awake. I suppose I must have this dream at least three times a month, if not more. When I wake, it takes me some time to orient myself to the present time, to the present place. It might take me several seconds to recall that I have a wife and children, and that my brother and sister, my parents, are not actually under the same roof as I am.
* * *
Two nights ago (on the very night I wrote the above), I had a version of this "dark house" dream, but this time I was in a huge hotel. Of course, it wasn't a hotel at first. I think it may have started out as my old high school, and the beginning of the dream, which I have only a vague recollection of, might have been something along the lines of the "adult student" dream. The part of the dream which I vividly remember took place when the building had become a giant hotel. I was with my first family, I believe, but somehow I wound up becoming separated from them. I was in a hotel room alone, and naturally, everything began to become engulfed in darkness. There was a television on, as there almost always in these types of dreams, and this was giving what appeared to be the only light. I ventured out into the corridor, and wandered around some, but everything was so quiet, lifeless, and dark that I quickly went back into the room I was occupying, with the typical feelings of abandonment, isolation, and fear.
What was different about this dream was the fact that I knew what was afoot, and decided early on not to venture too far. I must have been conscious inside the dream that I wouldn't be able to find anyone or make my way, perhaps because I had only a few hours before been discussing this dream-darkness and it was fresh in my mind. I believe that I woke fairly quickly after realizing that I wasn't going to get anywhere or find anyone. Interesting.
Here's a poem-like item I wrote on the subject of my dreams:
SELF INTERVIEW
I.
Open the curtains, darkness, flip switches,
darkness, darkness so thick it hurts
there. In that here. An abyss.
You stumble blindly through the house
you grew up in. Yes. Always.
But you left years ago. Did you feel
No. I never felt completely secure there.
Alright, ask. The cause of all that?
How many times can I say it, yes yes yes.
Confined, lazy. All of those,
all at once. Absolutely no reason. But you
Absolutely no reason, because I could have
changed everything. I had no strength.
Now look out the window to the left
past the casements which I mentioned
many times. Old hunting cabin Dad
made over, no closets, frames put up
but never finished, had my own bed,
double wide. You were about to describe
the window. Not describe. Look out of.
Trees with soldiers in them. Remember now
these are dreams. My brother and I
would lay on the bed with invisible rifles
and pick them off, one by one they'd drop
thump thump on the ground, roll down
the slope of the hill like boulders.
You killed them. They weren't really there.
But in the dreams I have now, those trees
are dark and breed darkness, multiply
and weave darkness upon darkness,
in the winds outside the window they sway,
like monsters. Leviathans. Sure, I like that.
Behemoths, more like, land-locked.
But it's every night or every other.
The family is out, the cars are gone.
It's night time. Bang. Black-out. Always
the same. Silver horn of panic. Bile
in the throat. No lights. Paw under shades,
mildewy shades, can't find the switch.
Relax. Can't. It's always the same. TV
pops off, zoomph, black. No lights. I know
the power goes out, but in the dreams
I don't realize. I mean I don't make
the connection. It's not that the power
is out, it's that all the bulbs have given
up the ghost at once. Just my luck
kind of thoughts. You feel persecuted?
Victim of bad luck? Last one. Not so first.
Bad luck, bad juju. Or haunted? God yes.
You know I don't believe in the preternatural.
Not at all? No. But I'm afraid of ghosts.
Hear me out. I didn't mean to laugh.
II.
Towns I've never seen, on the bright edges
of cities no maps take note of. Gothams.
But these are real towns, full of teens
in convertibles tearing down boulevards,
not the teens I knew, but I'm stuck with them.
Handsome devils all, with perfect girls,
never lost, never abandoned. How do you
know they are not the ones you went with?
I don't recognize them, and I don't like them.
Can we move on? No. Like I said, cruising.
Finding parties to which I'm not invited.
Finding a girl. Losing the girl. Chasing her
through labyrinths, crowds always smothering her,
snuffing her like a taper. I found my wife kneeling
by a divan, giving some quarterback
a hand-job. About eight times my size it was, in
her tiny hand, tattooed, with buttons, levers,
bells and whistles. I'd been given the standard
issue. She seemed delighted. Who wouldn't be?
Waterfall. Pardon? Waterfall. Lights on a hill
in a ring, a sheer drop, tree roots hanging,
and a waterfall. They climbed through it,
brave, undaunted. I couldn't go through. I
could never get to the other side. Slopes. Floors
sloped. Driveways at impossible angles,
red-tiled floors I'm slated to mop, steep. Water
related to loss? Water related to inadequacy?
Of course. I'm afraid of water. I can't swim.
Tidal waves, submarines, collossal vessels,
everyone's smiling. A day at the fucking beach.
Tanned, smiling. When my toes can't touch bottom
I'm a dead man. And then they dive:
From cliffs to slender uprising columns
of stone. They somersault, swandive, jack-knife,
hundreds of feet, and always land upright, dead-
center. Balance, no worries. Turn and dive a hundred
feet lower, onto a narrower platform. Then they
look up dot-size and beckon with peachy arms.
They don't understand your fear? No, and
why should they? It's so damned easy for them.
III.
Looked for C-wing, but wound up
in cellars, or out side doors I never knew
were there. That were not there.
Rows of blue lockers went on and on
ad infinitum, an illusion, done with mirrors.
How would I find mine, nothing
I had was there, I'd long since forgotten
the combinations. A pink flimsy paper
with my classes clutched in hand,
no books. No familiar faces.
Hallways sloped like irregular hills
and at their mysterious ends small white
holes of light, mold, rot, dead teachers.
Biology lab, test tubes, bunson burners,
students I've seen full grown at gas-stations.
C-wing senior homeroom, for the thousandth
time, elusive door and flag and book stink.
No I have not done the assignment. I did not
know of the assignment. Let's go back to the
cellars was it? Bathrooms, but deep down,
low ceilings, stools with floaties, paper
wadded in corners. No stall doors and where
there are doors they don't function, won't lock.
The place is usually the same, not much
changes, and it's not so much fear as shame.
Where is that goddamm room, the seven
or eight searches between bells. Mile-long
corridors boiling with impossible girls.
In the back of my dreaming mind I think
I still don't give a damn, can't find the door.
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