A Blockage in the Brain

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.

Your Old Men Shall Dream Dreams

“It is of a dream,” he said; “no more than

that; and yet dreams, too, are under the hand

of the good God, so I hold. Some, I know, are

just folly, and tell us nothing but the con-

fusion of our own nature when the controlling

will is withdrawn; but some, I hold, are the

whispers of God, and tell us of what we are

too dull to hear in our waking life. You do

not believe me ? Very well ; then listen."

-         From Father Stein’s Tale, by Robert Hugh Benson

What! Dreaming Again?

For a while there I was keeping what amounted to a Dream Diary. I would almost lie in wait to pounce on a dream to remember and record it. Perhaps I thought it would tell me something, if only about myself. About five years ago I stopped worrying about it so much, letting most dreams go with maybe recording one or two major details of the more striking ones. Well, this morning I had a couple of strangely vivid dreams that I felt I had to record.

Awake at 5:30 AM from a strange dream. A would-be king, his wife, an archbishop, and 2 or 3 other courtiers are gathered rather privately in a royal chamber. The old king has just been deposed and they are discussing what is to be done. The archbishop, who knows most about protocol, asks where the crown is; the ‘new’ king is already wearing it. He asks him to take it off; he’ll get it back when they’ve established his right to it and had a proper coronation – which they will whatever happens. Meanwhile it won’t look good; not proper etiquette. The archbishop takes the crown and starts fiddling with it; it falls in two. Everyone is appalled, but a courtier points out that it is two crowns joined anyway; they find the screws that were holding it together. A young, naïve foreign princess enters the room; she has no idea what’s going on. After a few moments she notices the crown and is outraged; that is the King’s crown! How dare they play with it! She was going to marry the prince, in time. They calm her down, gently explaining the situation (in terms she will accept). They will need her for power plays, maybe even as an alliance. It was like a 1970’s BBC production.

And that’s where I believe my mind got the fuel for this dream, from my lately watching episodes of Henry the Seventh, and touched off by watching some guys’ first reaction to the regal machinations of The Lion in Winter. I can see no other connection to real life.

I laid down and slept until 9:30 AM. I woke up from another dream: Susan and Andy were living in Nanny’s old house; it was much better kept and not as crowded. The living room had one couch and a wide space with the old yellow rug still. I was there, and Kameron was getting hungry waiting for them to get home for supper. I started making him a peanut butter and pineapple jelly sandwich in the kitchen. Suddenly they did get home, with Ollie and Julia in tow. They were worried that Julia’s hair had gotten wet coming through the rain. She was carrying a little blankie folded up with toys, including blocks.

Now this one did have ties to what’s been going on. Memories of Nanny’s house are tied to the basic atmosphere of the old days that have emerged from Susan going over various family relics. We are expecting a visit from Ollie and Julia (brought by Kaitlyn and Ryan, of course) later today; also, rain is promised in the forecast. I find it interesting that it takes place in a kind of parallel timeline where Susan and Andy are living in San Marcos, with me and Kameron still there as dependents. Some things never change, even in dreams.

A Wish That Your Heart Makes?

I have sometimes fancied that it will one day be our restored preternatural power (either in Heaven or after our Resurrection) to have total recall of our past, whether to relive the best moments of our life and have them grow sweeter in the process, or to recall our worst moments and repent and redeem and heal them with forgiveness.

And I’ve further fancied that this total recall would cover not only our waking moments, but our dreams, and we’ll finally know clearly what they meant and whether or not they were simply the brain clearing out mental garbage. I have further farther imagined that we will somehow have the power to finally share these dreams fully, and not just as a clutched handful of fading, withered images. Perhaps my most tenuous hope is that others will finally see what I mean and might actually be interested in them.

I have attached these thoughts to Tolkien’s theory of Subcreation, which found the most full-bodied example in Leaf by Niggle, where the imaginative production by an artist is given reality and things half-guessed are at last fully expressed and perfected in the afterlife, thus adding in their small way to the creation of the Prime Creator. There are people in my dreams I would like to meet, and dreamscapes I would like to wander and explore. And as for my waking creations...! Korm and Roth already seem real and separate from me, and I would love to explore the streets of Morg City. And Bob Bellamy might be able to teach me a thing or two.

Of course, the flipside might also apply if I go to a not-quite-so desirable afterlife. Complete memory might be an added pain and affliction as I relive all my poor decisions and missed chances. I can remember some nightmares that might well add to the pains of Hell. But then Hope is one of those virtues that I try to hang onto. And I reflect that if my strange whims and fancies about Heaven are not true, then something better will be.

As King Arthur in Excalibur might say, “It is a dream I have.”

 

Back to the Dream Wars: Arr, Me Hearties

 

Awake about 2:30 AM from a dream of being on a pirate ship. The ship was rotting and falling apart because the pirates were too debauched to care for it. I knew it was about to fall apart, so I went and abstracted some delicate tools (almost like watchmaker’s tools) from the workroom. I didn’t know if they would do me any good, but I thought it would be a shame if they were lost. I put them in my ‘ditty bag’. I also got a blackish bottle with some kind of hard liquor or drug; that I knew would be useful. I felt hostile and suspicious eyes on me as I went about my prepartions to leave.

There was a time when I went out of my way to record my dreams, and took great efforts to remember them. I have a huge file of them, including a record of vivid dreams I remembered from years ago. A couple of years ago I gave up such compulsive recording, however. But I do occasionally jot down the stray odd dream now and then. I call them the Dream Wars, because they tend to pop up when my sleep is unusually disturbed or erratic, and are usually in the nature of some kind of conflict or dubious action. 

Two-For-One Deal

 I usually have two recurring dreams. In one I am cutting out pizza crusts back at my old job; in the other I have found a treasure pile of ornate old books and must try to acquire/save them. Well, last night I dreamed that they were forcing me to cut pizza crusts out of good old books, but I managed to save four particularly good ones before they were shut down for health violations. You shouldn't be making pizza without the proper ingredients.

Dream A Little Dream

 

GENERAL INTRODUCTION: DREAM A LITTLE DREAM (2016)

 

So, the other day I woke up and wrote down a dream I just had. This was not unusual. I've been recording, on and off, strange dreams that have impressed me for years, at least since the middle 1990's. I had, in fact, written down two more during the past week. What was unusual was that I then read an article at Brain Pickings about Grahame Greene and his dream diary.

Near the end of his life, Greene put together over a quarter century's worth of the most interesting of his dreams and published them in a book. Here is what he says in the introduction:

"It can be a comfort sometimes to know that there is a world which is purely one’s own — the experience in that world, of travel, danger, happiness, is shared with no one else. There are no witnesses. No libel actions. The characters I meet there have no memory of meeting me, no journalist or would-be biographer can check my account with another’s. I can hardly be prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act for any incident connected with the security services. I have spoken with Khruschev at a dinner party, I have been sent by the Secret Service to murder Goebbels. I am not lying — and yet, of all the witnesses who share these scenes with me, there is not one who can claim from his personal knowledge that what I describe is untrue." -- A World of My Own: A Dream Diary, by Grahame Greene.

I thought of other author's who kept dream journals, like William S. Burroughs or Stephen King, and all the people who did it as a form of therapy. Suddenly it struck me that I had over twenty years of my own recorded dreams, scattered here and there in my files. I always wanted to collect them, put them in some cohesive order. Just now, I have plenty of down time. Why not do it at last?

That is what I've been doing for the past two weeks. I had most of the dreams gathered in a paper file. Some were typed, some hand written. There were detailed accounts, and cryptic notes. They were recorded on all sizes of ruled paper, on typing paper, and on folded tray liners from work.

I kept finding more. I recorded five "primordial" dreams that I had in childhood. I had finished typing up everything in the folder and numbering them, in chronological order, when I discovered a new cache in my journals. The numbering had to be re-done. I cursed myself every time I had not dated a dream, and even now I'm not entirely sure of the order. I kept tweaking refinements to the format, made titles for quick identification of the dreams, made an index of title and number. And most mornings would bring new dreams.

A big part of the joy of this exercise has been simply editorial. I've cut big gobs of run-on prose (my usual dream writing style) into more easily handled slices. I've removed countless "seems like"s and "kind of"s, but had to insert quite a few "that"s for clarity's sake. Also, I replaced a few unclear pronouns with definite nouns. But mostly I didn't cut or add anything to the original recounting.

One thing I've realized is that, as I've recounted dreams over the years, I've gotten better at recording a readable dream. You can't just write down the bare facts. You've got to put down the atmosphere, what you were feeling, the point of view. Perhaps because of all the books and movies I've consumed, my point of view isn't always me. A lot of times I'm looking at things from third person limited, or through another person. And what adventures we've had.

I've seen aliens, sasquatches, and sea monsters. I've met J. R. R. Tolkien, Ursula K. LeGuin, C. S. Lewis, Mark Twain, Quentin Crisp, and the Queen of England. There were fairies, ghosts, and wizards. I have met (and been) Gandalf, Goku, and the Scarecrow. There has been time-travel, dystopia, and stellar phenomena. I've encountered family and familiar places in crisis situations, from floods, volcanoes, and robbery, to crashing space stations.

I've been to my grandmother's haunted (and haunting) house more times than I can remember. I've visited labyrinthine cemeteries, lost valleys, vast wooded back country, and monolithic cities, and I've wandered dark, winding streets. I go to stores with no money, find prizes that slip through my fingers, try to get a ride home, and plunge along highways out of control.

I've flown on my own, and in a surprising number of hovercars. I cast spells, perform exorcisms, and have done incredible feats of martial arts. I've changed form, both at will, and not. While I'm personally involved in most dreams, some are perfectly contained little tales of their own that I observe from afar. I've got the skeletons for at least a dozen short stories here.

When I was very small, I told my brothers a sequence of on-going tales that I feigned were a series of Continuing Dreams, mostly about the adventures of my imaginary friends. The examination of this collection leads me to wonder if there might have been more truth in that pretending than I realized... 

Well! It's been fun collecting all these dreams into a uniform, active document. Patterns have emerged, and old times have been recalled. None have been prophetic...so far. I just added a new one today. This brings the count up to one hundred and sixty-nine, and there is no end in sight. I'm sure that, as in the past, I will grow weary of recording them, or things will get too busy. But I'm also sure that eventually, given the chance, I will come back to them. And the Dream will continue.

--MAY 27, 2016 

Afterword:

And sure enough after a while I began recording dreams again, in 2018, it seems. But in the last few months (years, maybe) I have not been so punctilious as I was then. My dreams seem to have changed their tenor, somehow; no longer do I have 'third person' dreams, and the dreams that I have been having are less 'fantastic' if no less improbable. This makes them seem even more ominous. "What man can remember his own dreams?" I do, Dr. Morbius, I do. But I'm trying not to impose them at length on anybody anymore.