Dreams, Crazy Dreams!

I woke up from my dream recently, shaking my head at how strange it was. But as I began to tell my son all about my strange dream, I woke up... for the second time! A dream within a dream! That was something new. I am one of the extremely vivid dreamers, and have been so all of my life. I remember a lot of my dreams, including ones I had as a child. My dreams are so realistic sometimes that I have a hard time getting oriented when I wake up.

I have dreamed like this all my life. I quite clearly remember being a very small child, no more than two years old, and I dreamed a serial dream; that is, every night I would experience a little bit more of the dream. It was very simple; I wanted to play on the slide in the backyard. The first night I was looking out the back door; the next I opened the door; the next night I stepped through the door in to the backyard, etc. until one night I actually began to slide down the slide. I never dreamed that dream again.

I frequently dream about the church I grew up in. That was the setting of my first nightmare, when I was about 12 years old. It concerned a church dinner with guests who turned out to be murderous. Sometimes I dream I have arrived at church naked; that one is incredibly awkward! When I was a child, I had a dream that the ladies of the church were doing the dishes after a meal, and my sister and I asked to be allowed to go down the drain and see what was down there. We discovered a different world down the drain, but the children there did not like us, and began pelting us with rocks; then we heard the ladies calling us back so they could go home.

Different times in my life seem to bring about different types of dreams. For a while, the people in my dreams were always morphing into someone else. Sometimes I'll have nightmares and very unpleasant dreams for a while. Then I'll go through a stage where I am visiting new places and meeting new people; later I'll go back and visit them in another dream. Loved ones who have died sometimes come for a visit, telling me they are doing well. It is always so good to see them again! When our youngest son turned 21, I had a series of dreams where he was a baby in a stroller and as I walked down a winding path with him, he gradually grew up. By the time I stopped, he was an annoyed adult sitting in a baby stroller.

Recently, my dream was in the form of a Victorian novel, say Dickens. Each scene was shown on an elaborately decorated page; to dream the next scene, the page had to be turned. But then it was like a pop-up book, for the scene to be enacted. Or, I'll dream that characters in my book interact with characters from a television show, so that perhaps the characters from Star Trek interact with the characters from a Jane Austen novel, for instance.

Not long ago, I began to eat in my dreams. One night I was helping a bride do a food tasting to decide what to have at her reception. I tasted different kinds of rich cake quite clearly. Another night it was pie; once it was health foods and foreign foods. The tastes are quite vivid and I wake up feeling full, and very satisfied; all the next day I feel as if I really did eat that food.

Also I see colors, and feel as well as smell things. One night I was being burned at the stake along with other people, and I could hear the flames crackling, and smell the smoke. I woke up fearing that the house was on fire. But it wasn't, thankfully. If I dream about an argument or someone doing something that makes me angry, I have to fight being angry with them the next day, because it is all so real. One night recently, I even dreamed that I was a pair of wire-rimmed glasses, and a gentleman bent me all up like a pretzel. I was so angry, that when he put me on his nose, I pinched him!

I never know what my dreams will consist of, and they keep my nightlife lively! When I was a child, I half believed that I actually lived fully in two worlds. Asleep here, I was merely waking up and living there, and vice versa, with memories haunting the life in each. But as an adult, I wonder if they have to do with the fact that I love to read, and write, and what is that but living in a dream world anyway? So perhaps my brain just has to process everything and sort out what's real and what's imaginary. Whatever the answer, my vivid, multi-color, sensory-rich dreams certainly keep things from ever getting dull!