The Dreamscape

My fascination with fiction in its many forms extends to dreams. After my parents died and the darkness deepened, I found that I was having richly symbolic dreams and I kept a diary for a while. I struggled to describe the imagery in my dreams but I did my best so that I could look back and read them at some point.

Last night I had a vivid dream. I was on a raft, but it was quite an elaborate raft, large and full of people. We were going down a wide river or waterway, passing islands.
When you go on the ferry to Vancouver island you pass smaller islands, and at night the houses on them are all lit up like cottages in a fairy tale.
When you go down the Rhein, there is a point where there is a bank in the middle of the river and a miniature gothic house is built on it.

At first in my dream, my friend Eilish was steering the raft and I was looking out at houses. Then the river became more treacherous, dark green lianas hung overhead like a painting by Henri Rousseau. I realised now that Simone had taken over and was steering the raft.
That was all there was to the dream, just the raft, the landscape, the river and two of my friends.

There is something about the dreamscape that reminds me of an easter egg embedded in the programming of Excel. I think it is called flight simulator, but to me it is like travelling across the landscape of a dream all purples and blues and you can get caught in it, unable to escape.

It must be both scary and exciting to have dreams that foretell the future, like the character in the TV series 'Medium', but mine are generally easily traceable to their source. A couple of nights ago I dreamt that I was looking to my left and my mother, a light glowing from her was trying to tell me something. I woke and realised that to my left, Kevin still had the reading light on.

Last night I was watching Sunday's L-word. Dana, dealing with the double horror of chemotherapy and the butchery that is breast cancer surgery, had a dream that she was whole again and at peace. The writers are dealing with this tough subject so well. As the programme is about women mainly, there are no men standing around telling Dana that she won't be any less of a woman because of it. One of the characters in fact does the opposite, thoughtlessly reminds Dana of what she has lost, as the writers explore the parallel storyline of Moira who wants to lose her femininity. There were exceptionally well-written dialogues between Alice and Dana as Alice tries to help Dana to sort out what she needs to deal with from the mire that she is lost in. Dana's grief and horror at what has happened to her is also eloquently handled.

My most recurrent dreamscape is that of a house or flat where I am living in which I discover new rooms. The dream house is supposed to represent the mind. There is a famous house dream that is used to explore the difference between Freudian and Jungian interpretations of dreams. In Jung's interpretation, the lower levels of the house represent his idea of the collective unconscious, race memories that we share, for Freud the unconscious mind reveals things within ourselves that we are hiding from.
In the dream I work out what the room could be, what I can put in it, in the waking dream I am fascinated by each new room in the house, whether opened by others through fiction or by myself through introspection.

How often do we escape in dreams, how often do we have to escape the dreams themselves? Mine are calmer now, quieter, I no longer fly to escape demons and monsters, nor do I struggle to find scissors to cut spiders' webs that I am enmeshed in. It's a long time since I had to wake myself up deliberately from a dream or wake up with my heart pounding. Not so long since the dead spoke to me though.