Some people claim to never
dream, or at least don’t remember having dreams. Whether it’s my irregular,
fitful sleep patterns or what, I seem to have a plethora of them. Or maybe it’s
because I make an effort to recall them, reconstructing them as best I can
before I open my eyes, instead of just shaking off sleep and starting a new
day. I suppose it’s an effort to find patterns in my life, some sort of
psychological insight. There may very well be a supernatural element in the
habit, of the old idea of dreams being a message from beyond, that contributes
to my interest. It might be a combination of both, if you interpret the murky
depths of the subconscious as ‘beyond.’
I have plenty of dreams
where the import is clear: anxiety dreams about being stranded and trying to
get home, of disasters like floods or tornados overwhelming me, of being
swamped with work and being behind schedule. But there is one recurring element
of dreams I find unusual or puzzling. I often find myself dreaming about
blocks.
I mean plain, ordinary,
wooden children’s building blocks, the kind (usually exactly the kind) that we’ve
had since … forever, it seems. The dreams about blocks seem to be of two types:
those where I’m protecting the blocks that I have from being scattered or lost,
and those where I find blocks at garage sales or second-hand stores and want to
add them to my collection. They are never stacked in a building. They are always just loose,
but in a collection.
To be clear, I still have
many, maybe most, of the blocks we had as kids, darkened with decades of
handling. We had two sets, one larger, one smaller (the smaller has pictures as
well as numbers), and some that could be considered building bricks rather than
blocks. I remember making a wall of them across the backroom doorway at the old
house. I always wanted more of them. When I got older, I used them to construct
‘dioramas’ or sets for our action figures, so I was playing with blocks a lot
longer than most people do. One of the first gifts I bought my grand-nephew was
a set of wooden blocks; I mentioned to my niece that I should keep buying him
more and more blocks at every gift-giving occasion, as a sort of sideways way
of fulfilling my old dream. She said I’d better not.
I just had another block
dream a couple of days ago. This morning I decided to ask AI what the possible
meaning of such a dream could be. This is what it suggested:
“Dreaming of building blocks
often symbolizes life's foundational elements, representing your inner
self, habits, or goals, with details pointing to incomplete aspects of your
life or anxieties about your personal development. These dreams suggest you're
either actively creating or reflecting on the structures of your life, whether
it's your personality, relationships, or future plans, with each block
representing a fundamental piece. They can represent the basic components
of your life, suggesting a focus on establishing a solid foundation or concerns
about what's missing.”
And that makes a lot of
sense. I can see myself trying to protect basic elements of my past, perhaps
elements never completed or fading away and lost, like people and memories. I
can see myself trying to fulfill or supplement those elements; perhaps finding
them at garage sales and the like are hints that those things I want have been
abandoned by many people in the ‘modern’ world. Not seen as worthy of keeping.
But I want to find what’s missing or lacking and build a solid foundation at
last.
Well, that’s one possible
interpretation. Maybe I just plain-de-ole want some blocks. Perhaps I should
take the old ones out and fiddle around with them a bit. While I still can.
They are one of my last palpable links to a primeval childhood.
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