Thursday, August 16, 2007

Haunting monotony

Over the past week, my nights have been disrupted by these odd, nonsensical, repetitive dreams. By virtue of their nonsensical-ness, they are a little difficult to articulate, but I will give it a shot. Essentialy, from what I can tell, they involve the same situation being repeated over and over again. Even worse is I will wake up, clear my head and try to distract myself... only to fall back into the exact same dream when I drift back to sleep, as though it has been playing in an endless loop, even when I managed to escape from it for a little while. The activities themselves are totally banal- last night I believe it was trying to catch the same express bus I catch every day... but it kept driving by. However, the inability to achieve the seemingly most basic of goals is infinitely frustrating while in my dream state, and when I wake up, I often find my dopey mind trying to create ways to successfully reach this goal, as though if I can only catch that bus, I will be spared this neverending repetition that seems to prevent my sleep from refreshing me at all.

(It didn't help that, due to his lack of a clothesline, the Duke had t-shirts on hangers strewn about on all the pushpins on his wall to try to dry the shirts, so when I woke up, it looked as though eerie swaying-- the fan was going-- cardboard cut-outs were watching me toss and turn)

I remember these dreams from my teenage years. They would often be most prominent when I began a new job. For instance, it would endlessly be closing time at the store where I was working as a cashier. Just as I had finished the cash count, and everyone was locking up... one more customer would run in, and we would have to get everything running again. As soon as they went through, we would go to close down again... only to have another customer run in. And this would go on for seemingly the entire night.

The oddest thing about this latest sequence is that they come outside of the frame of any tremendous change, or even attempts at memorization (these dreams can accompany frantic attempts at learning, as well). I am a little ambivalent about working on some of my projects lately, since I know I won't get feedback for months, yet am too guilt-ridden to stop working. I may have to think about how symbolism of missing the bus may play into that...

7 comments:

Ant said...

Sounds like good old-fashioned anxiety dreams to me... :-)

The work thing is familiar to me - I've come to recognise the "thinking" parts of my work-cycle to feel very frustrating. A good week can go by and I appear to get very little done simply because I've been "thinking". But the week after, suddenly the goals fall like nine-pins because of all the preparatory work I did the week before...

But, even though I recognise all this now, I always still feel a smidge guilty that I'm not being more productive during the "thinking" bit.

I don't get anxious dreams though, I'd be really pissed if work started infringing on my sleep time!

Anonymous said...

recurring dreams freak me out! when i first started my blog anonymously, the dream i had that very night was that my entire family had somehow found out and were laughing about my posts :S i'm pretty sure i woke up crying! but alas, it was just a dream, thank heavens for that!

PDR said...

All I can say, never eat a giant marshmallow in one of your dreams, no matter how tempting!

Anonymous said...

Oh that's frustrating. I once had a lucid dream and have been trying to re-create that experience. So far going to sleep saying 'have a lucid dream, have a lucid dream' hasn't been doing the trick. I will keep you posted if I figure out a way to do it.

Crushed said...

I don't know if it's just me, but have you noticed how much of your dreams take place by night?

Have you ever had sleep paralysis?
Very scary.

Yoda said...

Those are dopey dreams indeed!

I usually have very uneventful sleep, never remembering any of my dreams. Y'day was different though! I dreamed that I was at a conference where everyone was going over their presentations and I had no presentation! I was talking about my topic and everyone was getting bored.

Scary shit!

eric1313 said...

Interesting thought, about how these dreams accompany frantic learning stints.

If the exauhstion level you have to reach before passing out after studying or writing particularily well is anything like mine, I do indeed feel bad for you. But it's worth it.

I'm sue you are a few people's favorite student.

Rest easy, Princess.
the whole world will still be yours to toy with in the morning.