Blogs by Dorien Grey
Dreams
2/9/2009 4:30:57 AM
"Books are a writer's waking dreams." (From Dorien Grey and Me, http://www.doriengreyandme.com, where new entries are posted every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Come on by.)
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I suppose it’s not surprising that someone so disenchanted with reality as I would take such pleasure in dreams. And though I’d never thought of it until this moment, I suppose a strong case could be made for the idea that books are in effect their writers’ waking dreams.
Dorien is to Roger what dreams are to reality. Neither Dorien nor dreams are constrained by the laws of physics, and I have delighted in that freedom all my life. I dream constantly, and vividly, and most often in color. I almost never have what I would consider to be a nightmare. The vast majority of my dreams range from interesting to fun to pure joy. I have dreamed entire original Broadway shows, complete with songs, choreography, and costumes. I have dreamed in linear thought, in freeform, and even, though it is impossible to describe, in boxes, weights, and reams of paper.
Something like talent show hopefuls, most of my dreams just wander in, do whatever it is they came to do, and leave. I may or may not remember them, but I always know they were there.
But then there are the very special dreams, and the variations-on-a-theme dreams. Two of my favorite theme dreams are of flying (one of the most common dreams) and of exploring houses. In the former, I on occasion soar high above the earth and over hills and valleys (I can close my eyes now and recall a couple of them quite clearly). But more commonly I am walking or running down a street and suddenly decide that I don’t want my feet to touch the ground…and they don’t. I’ll run, take a small jump, and then just coast above the sidewalk for very great distances. Another of this type of dream involves being in the upper balcony of a very large theater and deciding to fly, skimming along just below the ceiling. Or I’ll be in a stairwell high up in a building and will simply jump-float from landing to landing, often grabbing a railing lintel to swing myself around to go down the next flight. Sometimes I’ll just float down the open stairwell from top to bottom.
Overanalysing dreams tends to destroy their beauty, like taking the petals off a rose to try to see why it smells so good.
Dreams are and should be first and foremost fun...sometimes euphoric. And the best dreams of all are those very rare ones in which, soaring among the clouds, looking down at the earth below, we know it is not a dream.
The house dreams, which I delight in because their meaning is so clear it doesn't require analysing,, always involve my going into a house I’ve never been in before, entering a room, and seeing another door which I did not expect to be there, which leads to yet another room or suites of rooms, or entire apartments, all with other doors.
I know these rooms are my awareness of life, and life has endless doors and endless new rooms, and there is wonder in opening them.
But the single most significant dream of my entire life was dreamed when I was probably around 7 years old. I see now that it is quite closely related to my house-and-door dreams.
Again, I have only to close my eyes and I can see every detail. I am in what I somehow know to be some sort of basement, standing in the center of an endlessly long aisle flanked on both sides by an unbroken surface of control panels with buttons and switches levers and knobs and dials that stretched as far as I could see and disappeared in darkness. And I knew that every switch and knob and dial had a specific purpose and that in that huge room was unlimited power.
And as I was standing there, there appeared in the darkness at the very limit of my line of vision, a grey light which glided slowly up the aisle toward me. I was fascinated, but not frightened. As it got closer, I could make out that it was the transparent, grey ghost of a woman with a very large hat and clothes from the early 1900s. And I knew that this was my grandmother Annabelle Fearn, who had died in the flu epidemic of 1918 and who I of course had never met.
And at the instant that I recognized her, I also realized I would never know what the buttons and knobs and dials and levers and switches on the control panels actually did, and that I would never be able to find out.
And that single dream has proven to be the story of my life.
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