Dreams

Dreams have always been a problematic thing for me. In the last few years, it has calmed down a touch, but when I’m stressed, or the weather is weird or because somebody looked at me funny a month ago, I have either vivid, terrifying or lucid dreams (often a collection of all three). Despite the fact I don’t subscribe to anything even vaguely like dream analysis, it’s hard not to be perturbed. This is on my mind today because I had one of the worst nights in a while last night. Turn away all ye who expect quality writing from me, this is not a good example of it.

It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

I have been listening to a podcast recently called ‘Ars Paradoxica’ which is an incredible radio-drama-style podcast which follows the story of Dr. Sally Grissom who accidentally invents time travel while trying to disable the Higgs mechanism and gets sent back to 1943. It works on the “history is changeable but doing so has consequences” theory, where the human body has a lot of extremely adverse reactions to paradox. Pair this against the finale of the most recent series of Doctor Who, in which they messed around with most of the way that show is already established to work, and I think there’s some basis for an absolutely terrifying conceptual dream.

I often lucid dream, but without any of the usual control which people report to have. I have no idea why, but it’s a thing, so it makes it much harder when the part of my brain which is aware of whether or not I’m asleep just fails to register, especially when the dream includes several false awakenings. Seriously. I think my record is ‘waking up’ six times in one block, before everything descends back into chaos. It’s enough to make you never want to sleep again.

I also often have dreams which recur, but because of the lucid thing, I tend to try to work against the flow of the more uncomfortable ones. The ones in which I, or someone I love, die, or are subjected to extreme conditions, or sometimes there are witches? I never claimed to be well balanced.

Now imagine all of these threads intertwine. I (or the idealised version of me who is capable of achieving things) am stuck working through something which triggers in my brain as the plot of a book. Aware this is a dream, I am left to go along with it.

You appear in the middle of a story, in a house looking to have been styled after the starship Enterprise, all glass and white walls and awkward spaces. There’s a personal intrigue not worth exploring (don’t ask unless you really want me to blush), and then there is a choice, something explodes and everybody dies except me.
Almost immediately, the situation resets.
This often happens. Especially in the more ridiculous lucid dreams, I end up running the same sequence a few times over. I’m sort of used to it by now, the way it cuts to black and suddenly I’m working through something that has already happened. This time, however, I recognised the repeat and saw the time travel idea, in the vein of Groundhog Day, just with more panicking and death.

This happened a couple of times, around and around through different paths in the situation, and then I ‘woke up’ to my brother asking if I was alright — except the room was wrong, and it was clearly a false ending. On cue, the universe dissolves back into the beginning of the cycle again, we run the story again, and this time only one person dies. It just happens to be the one person I’ve been trying to save on each iteration — I’m being vague as I don’t remember who.

This is where the cycle breaks, and we’re left to deal with the aftermath of the generic calamity which has befallen the starship-house.

The colours faded into darkness
I was left alone

May I return to the beginning
The light is dimming, and the dream is too
The world and I, we are still waiting
Still hesitating
Any dream will do

‘Any Dream Will Do’ from ‘Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat’

I don’t remember what was happening as I woke up properly, but the night is darkest before the dawn and I remember hating every second of it trying to wake up. I’m left to wonder what it all means. I can take some wild guesses, but maybe I need to take Dumbledore’s advice, just this once.