Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Enter Sandman

My subconscious has been doing a number on me lately.

3 of the past 4 nights I've had nightmares, or at the least very suspenseful dreams.

Last night I watched one of my ex-boyfriends get eaten by a hoard of zombies. Ironically, it was the ex who has his own reoccurring nightmares about zombies. I woke up in a bit of a panic, managed to laugh at myself a little and then fell back to sleep trying my darnedest to think about cute puppies or rainbows or anything peaceful and pleasant.

Instead, I dreamed I was in a department store full of people milling around. Suddenly, all the TVs and speakers in the store started announcing this competition that would be happening in just a few minutes, some sort of scavenger hunt. The winner would get a million dollars. The person I was apparently with in my dream leaned in close and whispered "I love you, but I have to win this". I've never heard this person say that before so it caught me off guard, but before I could react he was gone.

Looking around me, I instinctively knew something was wrong. Instead of joining in the competition I calmly climbed out a nearby open window, scaled down a few stories and safely jumped to the ground. Suddenly my "point of view dream camera" swung outside of myself and I was looking at myself walking away from the store. It became one of those slow motion movie moments set to music- the heroine of the story casually sauntering towards the camera as the whole building blows up in the background. Stunning really. I wish I'd had a way to record it.

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Maybe we shouldn't read too much into dreams. Maybe they really are just the left-overs from the day rolling around and working themselves out, but I kept coming back to the way the relationship between me and the (ex/unexpected) love interest played out in the dreams. I'll spare you the gory details of my internal analysis, but eight hours of plowing through boxes at Pier 1 left me with an interesting question.

Would you rather have a good relationship with an indefinite time-line and no real knowledge of what could end it?
Or a good relationship with a definite end and clearly defined, openly admitted excuses to break it off? Perhaps knowing the details would allow you to relax and actually enjoy the other person?

I'm not asking which is better, because I don't think one is over the other and both have their perks... but what would YOU rather have?

4 comments:

Kat H said...

I've been having really weird dreams lately, too. I wonder what that's about. I had one where I was trying to prove Ryan Gosling didn't kill someone (sort of Murder by Numbers-ish). And my dreams are getting more cinematic in nature, too, with panning and different shot angles and depths. Does this mean that my brain has absorbed Hollywood hook, line and sinker?

It depends on the length of the timeline. If it's long, I don't think I'd want to know, but if it was only a year or thereabouts I would want to know so I could savor everything and experience more. Although I guess, after saying that, I should live my whole life savoring everything and experiencing more. Maybe that's my problem.

Anonymous said...

I think this is the time of odd dreams because I had an incredibly strange one last night that consisted of an alien-like parasite and a cruise ship devouring dog...

Anonymous said...

Your question reminds me of my Confucianism class (weird?... maybe :P)

So in class we were talking about what's necessary for becoming a person, and to make a long story short, one of the conditions is that you realize that you could die at any moment. This doesn't mean realizing in the sense that "well, everyone dies... it's what one does," but rather that you, personally, could die at any conceivable moment. That realization makes you more concerned about doing the right thing for the sake that it's right, instead of doing the right thing to acquire things. It's very existential.

Anyway, I think I'd rather be left in the dark. The realization that a relationship could end at any moment (in my mind) allows me to do things (like buying gifts, etc.) for the sake of that given thing, instead of doing things because I know when the relationship will end, and I want to do as much as possible before then.

Does that make sense?

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the comment! It doesn't happen often, but I guess if I wanted comments more often I could post more. :P

Mark shaved his head a couple of weeks ago, but we weren't really competing. It's actually a funny story: both Mark and I decided separately at almost the same time to grow our hair out, and didn't mention anything to each other until a week or so later!

That's an interesting perspective for cutting one's hair. I had never thought of it as control in a chaotic world!