I had a unique (for me) dream experience last week. I woke myself up
laughing. The details of the dream are lost, but the scene was some kind of "round table" meeting in what looked like a very old building. Castle, maybe. A young thief/rogue-ish looking woman was making some really impassioned, emotional plea. Right the apex of the dramatic speech, she flings a knife with impressive force out the window in emphasis. There's a moment of stunned silence. Then the guy sitting next to me makes this little mock, thrown-voice "Oww! ... Oh god, who would throw a
knife!" (think Will Farrell in Austin Powers).
It really wasn't very funny, but it was kind of a "laughing in church" sort of moment. Whatever the reason, my brain, asleep at 4 in the morning, apparently thought this was high comedy. I've never had that happen before.
You know what bothers me now, though? Not nightmares. I still have plenty of those, but they haven't bothered me since I was child. Now I mostly just find them kind of amusing and/or exciting. Occasionally I'll have a particular brand of nightmare that leaves with me a really eerie feeling in the morning, but even those aren't particularly bothersome. The worst dreams? Falling in love. Or experiencing a moment of pure, exquisite beauty. And then you wake up. @(#*$(@# you, brain!
I had one of the latter a couple months ago. I don't even know how to convey the
feeling of this dream. I was on a steep, forested hillside at night -- a few hours before dawn. The night was crystalline. You could see thousands of stars even through the pines. It felt as though I was warm even though the air was cool-bordering-on-cold with a soft breeze. I was sitting, knees drawn up almost to my chest, leaning back against the hill next to someone -- a young woman. We were talking quietly and lightly as we watched small points of light flickering down in the valley below. There were others elsewhere around. I can't remember anything that was said, or who she was. There was no sense of romance, just friendship and long acquaintance. In the dream, I was still my adult myself, but the feeling of that dream ... it was like I was still a child. The sensory flood all around me was still new and fresh. I was seeing the trees as though I hadn't already seen hundreds of thousands like them before. I felt and tasted that crisp pre-dawn air as though this was the first time I had ever awakened so early to experience it. The whole scene reverberated with such a deep sense of tranquility and contentment that it made the heart stand still.
And that was all. I can remember nothing else about the dream except that one moment and the feeling of knowing that it was slipping away from me and that there was nothing I could do about it -- not even to make it stay just a minute longer.
Those are the sorts of dreams that leave me
really rattled in the morning.
Fake edit:
Obligatory -
http://xkcd.com/621/