Details from Dreamland

Details from Dreamland

By Charles Kraus 

For the first many decades of my life, I didn’t dream, or at least, I woke with no recollection of having pushed imagined casts, plots and hidden agendas around in my subliminal subtext.    Slowly, over time, the wall between here-and-now and Freud’s playground diminished.  Not completely.  But gaps appeared in the bricking, and I began waking up recalling details from dreamland. 

I am a thematic dreamer.  My protagonists are circumstances. The guy who plays me puts up with a hell of a lot of frustration.  I’m certain that if Sigmund had a link to my subconscious proceedings, his interpretation would depress the hell out of me.  When wide awake, I look at my life and am pleased with what I observe. My assessment is that I’m a rather lucky and contented individual.  A great many of the items on my life-time to-do list have earned check marks.  OK, I’ve yet to produce that best seller, and only hot water flows from the hot water spigot.  No liquid gold.  At least, there is hot water.  Ultimately, I find it remarkable that the world has made room for the likes of me.  I’m thankful.

It is difficult to square the results of my self-appraisal with the dreaming that takes place in this very same head.  Therein is promoted a minority report composed of moody, disquieting sleep-time adventures.  “Lost-my-way” sensations build throughout these escapades.  When dreaming, I misread my bearings.  I don’t know where the hell I am.   Commonly, I have a goal and am experiencing difficulty achieving it.  Mostly my objective is to get somewhere.   I’m late, you see, and doing my best to reach an unspecified place by an appointed hour. 

 

I’m unsure of the route.  Not that it matters, as trudging towards what I’m sensing is the appropriate general direction, my progress is thwarted by misunderstand and happenstance.  I end up experiencing all the acuities you might encounter if you were trying unsuccessfully to cross a busy intersection.  I mean, if you were attempting this endlessly.  Looking for openings in the traffic, waiting more and more impatiently for the light to change in your favor, searching in vain for alternative routes, underground passages, pedestrian bridges, traffic cops.   The hour grows late, then it grows later, and still I stand there, cold, tired, hungry, but more importantly, upset that I am a no-show, disappointing people who are counting on me, whoever they are, wherever they are.  They do not understand why I’ve failed to arrive.  No cell phone, no pay phone available to transmit the explanation, or relay my good intensions, bad luck, and apologies. 

Psychologists might find my subconscious meanderings symptomatic.  I see my dreams as sore losers and under appreciators.  I may just send an intervention into the depths of their origination.  Grow up!  Don’t you know there is a real world out there?  Don’t you understand that some goal posts are aspirational?

 You learn that during visits to the lucid light of day.