Dreams

Crouching over a serene, scared, and innocent Mia Sara in the movie, “Legend,” a buffed-out and heavily-costumed Tim Curry retorts to our sad and scared heroine, “The dreams of youth…. are the regrets of maturity.”  In his allegorical role, the demonic-looking Curry is, in many ways, the most truthful and poignant speaker in the entire flick, delivering truthful lessons of life in a matter-of-fact style.

 

Dreams, by their very nature, defy logic or rational explanation.  To listen to Freud, everything comes down to the penis.  Sorry Mr. Freud, but your freaky issues do not apply to all of humanity.  Sometimes, dreaming about that perfect widget is, I believe, a metaphor for something much more deep and intense.  Other times, the dream really is simply all about a widget.  To paraphrase a brilliant literary analyst discussing Moby Dick, “sometimes a whale is just a whale.”

 

Do you remember your dreams?  Sometimes I do.  Some mornings, I wake up from a wonderful dream, only to feel the memory slipping quickly from my grasp.  I try desperately to hang on to some trigger about the wonderful episode before it entirely disappears.  Most of the time, when it is gone, it is gone.  Other times, every single detail remains, vivid as the light of day.  I can still taste the wine I drank in my dream.  I can still smell the flowers that bloomed in my dream. 

 

Some people only remember the nightmares.  For me, the type of dream seems to have little bearing on whether or not I remember it.  My cache of dream memories includes a full spectrum: happy to terrifying, exhilarating to boring, vague to detailed, realistic to fantastic, etc.  I can still vividly recall some dreams from early childhood – why they still stand in my memory is beyond me.

 

This morning, the memory of a dream lingered around to give me a chuckle.  What seemed so very serious in the dream turned into an absurd comedy in waking-life.  In my dream, Paul and I spent the weekend with his mother.  Every now and again, his mother would send Paul on an errand.  Within seconds of him leaving, she would do something weird – such as spring up from her chair (something she cannot do), to look out the window at the noisy children playing in the street.  Upset over the commotion, she would reach for a gun to go outside, and shoot in the air to scare the children.  “Zella!” I would yell.  “What the HELL are you doing?”  My mother-in-law would then shake the gun at me while yelling, “Watch your mouth, you!  We don’t use language like that in this house!”

 

Paul would, of course, return JUST after I had finished getting the gun out of her hand, only to have him lecture me.  “Mother feels safer having a gun nearby,” he would say.  “Mother doesn’t like it when you talk back to her.”  Speaking in this “Norman”-clature, Paul sounded completely irrational, something that simply does not happen in real life. 

 

How absurd!  Funny… but absurd!  As usual, in looking back at my dreams, I ask myself that age old question, “What the…?  What made my brain travel down THAT freaky-deaky path?”  As usual, there is no simple answer. 

 

Dreams… like an amusement park ride of undefined scope.  Enjoy the ride!