Dreaming
People tend to oversleep in my guest room. The ceiling is painted like a night sky and the tapestry curtains, when closed, shut out even the most gregarious moon. If one chooses to leave the Moroccan star light on up above, its soft blue lightbulb casts evocative shadows perfectly tailored for dreaming. Consequently, I keep a dream journal on the bedside table and have been delighted to read the entries written by those guests whose dreams have taken them across extraordinary thresholds while asleep in that room.
We are extravagant dreamers in this house. We soar, wingless, through palettes of technicolour in reveries guaranteed to confound even the most sagacious of interpreters. Think I’m kidding? For a while, The Songwriter experienced a recurring dream of a traveling evangelist with the strange and wonderful ability to turn himself into a gorilla rug at the close of each tent meeting.
He once dreamed of a cow that transformed into a monster when the moon turned full. Don’t laugh, now. He turned that particular dream into a song called “I’m A Werecow” that remains an annual favourite on the Dr. Demento Halloween radio show.
As for myself, I tend to be a fairly baroque dreamer. My somnolent travels are lavishly decorated with all the lilies gilded and Elizabethan music floating in through glassless windows. For years I have had a recurring dream of a neighborhood covered over by gargantuan, animated trees. The streets are now as familiar to me as my own. They spiral and twist past houses I recognize completely, though I’ve never seen them in my waking hours. And there is one house, large, with windows like the sightless eyes of the blind. It sits behind gates of wrought iron, mysterious and unsettling to my mood, looming silently in the shadows of a late afternoon, unwilling or unable to allow me entry. Strange, no?
My dreams have been easy to interpret of late. Populated with exploding sweet potatoes and suitcases full of water, they tell me I am feeling overwhelmed and behind. I hear their admonishments to slow down and breathe deeply, and I intend to heed them as best as I can. How wonderful that they communicate in such entertaining ways.
How about you?
Any good dreams lately?
Do share.
