Dreams Continued

Since I don’t have anything useful to say today (and all the stuff’s the same), I thought I’d continue yesterday’s comment discussion with a bit more about my dreams. Enemy of the Republic stated the professional opinion that you can’t die (as in ceasing to exist rather than passing into the afterlife) in your dreams because the ego won’t accept it. That’s a distillation – read her more eloquent description in the comments here (she commented twice).

First off, let me say the notion of a mental expert strikes me as the same as somebody claiming they know all the secrets of the universe based on the studies and observations made on Earth. I respect what most psychologists do (some are whiny puss-bags, but others do real and useful work), but the human brain is largely unexplored territory and so much of it depends on individual and cultural differences that I don’t believe in universal standards.

Second, I think we as a society place way too much emphasis on the importance of dreams. I view them as little movies the brain screens in order to keep itself entertained while the body sleeps off the beer and converts those mozzarella sticks to added thigh material. Maybe sometimes they have some real meaning or impact, but I think more often than not they are just stray brain ions passing into the ether.

I had never heard that rule about not dying in a dream, which is good because I’ve broken it several times. Again, I’m not talking about dreaming I went to Hell (I’ve never dreamed that) or heaven (yeah, right) – sitting here now, I can think of at least four dreams wherein I died, the dream faded to black as I passed, and then I awoke feeling frightened and slightly disturbed. Sometimes I have to vomit after those dreams. I’ll post a few of them here, trying to be brief.

Three of the dreams in which I died were set during wartime – two in WWII, one in Vietnam. I had them in my high school days when I watched a lot of unrealistic war movies and planned on a career in the military, taking your tax money to be paid to waste brown people (not that I cared about the color of the people I got to kill – I’m an equal opportunity destroyer – it just seems that lately we’re always taking it to brown people).

In the first, I dreamed I was an elite paratrooper recruit as part of a force that was trained to jump out of planes at 30,000 feet with no parachute and kill the enemy by landing on them. We were taught that, if done properly, we should be able to kill them without fatal injury to ourselves. Every time we made a successful jump (killed an enemy and made our way back to friendly lines) we would be given an instant promotion and sent on another mission; when we attained the rank of General, we could retire. My courage was bolstered because one of our numbers had survived to Colonel. When the signal came I dove out of the airplane, used the techniques they taught us to angle my descent, selected my target and landed on him. Unfortunately it was a German wearing an old-style decorative helmet with the spike on top. Just before we collided, the camera angle (for lack of a better term) switched from my point of view to just behind me. Yes, in my dreams my brain frequently switches points of view and camera angles. I heard his neck snap as I hit him, but also saw myself impaled through the heart. Everything suddenly went black and I woke up.

The next time I dreamed I was part of the crew of a B-52 Bomber. We were flying with a side hatch open (I don’t know if they actually have side doors, but this one did in my dream) and I was standing in the open doorway, scanning the forest below. The plane banked and I fell to my death. The camera angle for the entire dream watched me from behind.

The third dream was extremely short. A squad of infantrymen were walking through the Vietnamese jungle when an enemy soldier raised and fired his machine gun, killing all of us (what a shot). Again, from behind I saw the bullets exit my back as I fell dead in the muck.

Finally, here’s a very old post about a dream I had in 2004. It’s hosted on my BellSouth free web space which has been having bandwidth issues lately, so let me know if you can’t access it.