Saturday, February 10, 2007

Fantastic Dreams

I have had a number of amazing dreams in recent days.

The first, and best one I will tell you about happened several weeks ago. It is still quite vivid in my mind even now so retelling it won’t be a problem.

The first thing I remember is walking through my neighbors’ backyard. In real life the backyard slopes down from their house and then levels out as it meets the woods. In my dream some of my family members were walking through the level part, away from our own house. For some reason there was a funeral tent, one of those things that covers a gravesite at a graveyard. I remember commenting to myself even in my dream how strange it was as I walked under it.

We walked to the back right corner of their yard, which would have been woods in real life, but was a gigantic rocky hill. The hill had small bushes and short pine trees growing out of crumbly, salmon colored soil. We walked up a winding path that carved deeper into the hill the further we went and eventually came to an earthen tunnel. My family proceeded into the tunnel ahead of me with no problem, but when I approached it, only my face could fit in it. I shouted for them to proceed without me, that I would find a way around the tunnel. I climbed up the left side of the of the path and up over the tunnel opening then walked along the rough surface of the hill until it dropped off to the other end of the tunnel. I looked down and saw my family exiting the tunnel and heard them chatting to each other. I made my way down to them and we looked out over a large gully.

The tunnel opened onto a ledge about eight feet deep at the side of the gully. The gully looked like a place for water to run off, or a road that had been cleared through the woods but hadn’t been paved yet, but was 200 feet wide. We turned to the left and walked along the ledge about twenty feet before the ledge ended at an earthen wall. By some miracle my neighbors had built a large, sturdy, steel bridge that spanned the gully to another ledge on a hill on the other side. As we walked across, other people, strangers I didn’t know, were milling about on the bridge, smiling and playing with their children as if it were a public park. We reached the other side and the dream took a major turn.

My family kind of disappeared from the dream without me really noticing and was replaced by my old boss, Doug from New Jersey. The bridge was similar enough to a launch pad gangway because all of a sudden we were on an Apollo-type spacecraft. Inexplicably we skipped the launch and were suddenly in space. I looked out the window of the spacecraft and saw Saturn looming large ahead of us. I remember thinking, “We are going incredibly fast if we are already approaching Saturn.” Doug seemed excited and decided he was going outside the spacecraft. He opened the hatch and I panicked, realizing I needed to put a helmet on, but to my amazement found that it was already on.

Saturn’s light cast a white, dreamy glow on everything: the instruments on the inside of the spacecraft, Doug, and the edge of the hatch. I drifted over to the hatch, which was on the left side of the ship, and stuck my head out. Before me was a vast field of stars, to my left, behind the spacecraft, was the distant disk of Jupiter. Doug, like so many people in my dreams, simply disappeared at this point without me even noticing. I looked back to my right, but Saturn wasn’t there anymore. It was replaced by what looked like a movie studio. The back wall was off-white with an octagonal hole in it, which seemed to be about 20 feet across. The floors and walls were white where they met the wall, but transitioned to black the closer they got to me and then disappeared into space, as if they blended right in to the fabric of space itself. On the floor, angled in my direction were a few studio lights shining brightly.

I was floating untethered outside the spacecraft, traveling at the same incredible speed, and I watched the studio lights as they whizzed past me to my left. When I looked back to my right, the spacecraft had disappeared without me noticing, and I was hurtling towards the octagonal hole in the wall, which I found out shortly was actually an octagonal tunnel. All around the mouth of the tunnel were fluorescent bulbs, angled randomly, which were colored pink, yellow and orange. Some of them blinked, and some of them were steadily lit.

I floated at a high rate of speed directly into the middle of the tunnel and saw that the colored fluorescent bulbs continued down the tunnel a few hundred feet. They gave way to unlit, transparent, acrylic-looking tubes about the same size and length, and they too were colored similar colors: red, yellow, and orange. They were mounted at random angles on off-white walls that seemed to be illuminated by soft fluorescent lights, though there was no discernable light source. I floated rapidly for a long time down the tunnel, which was now much wider, probably at about 50 feet, and realized I had no way to steer in case the tunnel changed direction. Almost in response to my thought the tunnel began to gradually curve to the right and I eventually hit the wall and bounced off the tubes, which flexed and sprung me off to the right.

The tubes, while still covering the walls, began to appear in clumped masses extending from the walls so that I had to avoid them. Somehow I had gained the ability to slowly steer in wide arcs, perhaps just by willing it. I steered under and over them a few times as the tunnel continued to turn this way and that. Somehow I could tell that the tunnel had made a full U-turn and I was headed back the way I came. The tunnel gave way to open space once again and I could see Jupiter in the distance, but somehow I came to a stop and landed on a “floor”.

There in front of me was a large air cushion, the kind that sit at the feet of bungee jump towers, with kids jumping up and down on it. Standing around it was a small group of people talking to each other. I walked up to them and saw that they were the crew of the original Star Trek series, but they were teenagers. I only remember Scotty specifically. He was squat and had long black hair and a long, greasy, pointed, black moustache. We had a conversation, but I don’t remember what we said. In fact that’s where my dream ended.

Strange huh?

I do know some visual imagery that influenced my dream. The spacecraft looked much like the Apollo capsule from Apollo 13 when the craft was dimmed without power. The steel bridge was almost exactly like the gangplank in Apollo 13, but much wider. The octagonal tube came from 2001: A space Odyssey, as did the fluorescent and acrylic tubes. They come straight from the end sequence of the movie with all the abstract lights.

I think Doug was in my dream because he is a small business owner, which I intend to be soon. I think the bridge and tunnels all have to do with transition. I am assuming it has to do with my transition into business for myself. Perhaps even the funeral tent was a symbol of change. The anxiety over the lack of control as I drifted down the tunnel has to do with uncertainty of the future. The future, I suppose is represented by the 2001-influenced tunnel. It was futuristic in design even though the year in which the movie took place has already passed.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yes, you are definately weird. Love ya anyway!

Jason said...

Yeah, and I didn't smoke crack or anything. Amazing! Back at ya bro.