These are from recent emails to friends, I am reposting them here mostly for my own tracking and memory.  My dreams are always detailed, complicated and intense.  So some reason lately I’ve been remembering them more clearly.  Alas I still haven’t been able to effectively translate the detail and story of them into writing.  It’s like they are using up that part of my brain when I awake and I can’t pull the rest of psyche together enough to write them down.  Anyway, here dreams:

I’m only just up. I had what feels like about 70 hours of long, complicated dreams about shopping for a car in city recovering from a massive flood. And more hours of trying to get out of that city before it flooded again. And then more hours about being one of three runaway Indian girls who end up in college in a weird situation where one of the girl’s boyfriend’s sort of creepily manages all three of the girls lives. But I was being pursued by a not acceptable boy and wasn’t sure how to get away (again) or out of the situation without being killed. The phone woke me up. That dream began with one girl running away and “me” and the other girl ostensibly helping her mom to find her, but eventually ditching the mom and joining up with the first girl. It also had hours about acceptable Indian fashion (sexy but not revealing) and learning to put on make up like adults and adjusting to college life and pretending we were making our own lives when we all knew we trapped in some sort of horrible patriarchal system that was going to leave us miserably married or as prostitutes with no in between, since we’d abandoned any help from our families.

Yeah, in the car/flood dream, all the cars were somehow broken down into reassemble-able components and stored in stacked boxes (after being cleaned of flood waters), so I had to navigate through huge warehouses looking at pictures on boxes and the guy kept showing me perfect ones that were like $10,000 out of my price range. He was also wearing a cowboy hat and hitting on me. His secretary kept trying to tell him something that I eventually intuited had to do with the Mafia and was creepy enough that I kept trying to get out of there, but he kept cornering me and talking to me. His father was some friend of my family and I couldn’t just simply escape without causing some insult. I wasn’t going to trade my car in either, as I planned to sell it for one dollar to a victim/survivor of Hurricane Katrina who really needed it (the result of watching Treme before bed, maybe). The dream also contained a lot of walking on destroyed beaches and watching flotsam rush by as rivers rose again.

(the the next night):

I dreamt for hours about church. About being outside a church and listening to the music and waiting while service ended and sneaking in right before the second service and sitting in a back corner. I dreamt the entire service, all the music and the sermon. I dreamt of a sort of a halfway intermission in which I sat and listened to this group of church folks (who worked for the church) tell stories on each other and congregation members. I dreamt about running into [a friend] and discussion the hours I’d driven to be at this service.

I also dreamt of woods and cabins and building a small arched bridge to nowhere that was decorative for me and my about to be husband to walk over after the wedding ceremony. I dreamt of having to put together the flowers and my bouquet myself. Of asking said future husband to wear what I wanted and him consenting (purple tie). I dreamt of planning it with my mom and my Grampa helping me to build the bridge. It was a different smaller, church where the wedding was. In a huge, shady west coast forest, but on a sunny day, so the light filtered through the trees.

(from other comments on this dream)

Last night I dreamt Grampa taught me how to build a small, arched bridge with a railing. He only helped a little so I’d still know how to do it by myself when he was gone.  I had wanted to piece the boards together in pattern like hardwood floors, so they went longways across the bridge.  Iwas going to soak them and bend them.  Grampa told me that bent boards would never be strong enough for me, so cut the arch out of some huge lumber and he showed me how to piece short boards crosswise, beveling each edge so there would be nothing to trip on over the curve.

—

I commented this morning to a friend that it’s almost always me in the dream stories, though not in the sense of actual me.  In fact, it’s rarely ever me, rather it’s always in first person so I see through the character’s eyes, more like I’m reading a book.  When it is really me in the dreams there is almost always a family member present, usually my grandfather, but sometimes my mother or my sister.

Also the detail doesn’t always come back to me at once and it’s frustrating because suddenly a piece of the story will be startlingly clear, but then then rest of seems to fade, so I can’t quite pull all of it together enough to write more than an executive summary of the dream, rather than being able to string together the details to relay the actual story as I experienced it.  Sometimes talking about it is enough to pull more of it from my memory, but other times it seems talking actually deletes parts of what I was trying to remember.