Usually I have long narrative dreams with lots of symbolism, but not these days.
The best way to describe them is to say that I'm stuck in some sort of pointillist painting.
You know those walkways in from of construction sites where they cut circles through the plywood so that you can check up on the building's progress? Yeah. That's what these dreams are like. I'm wandering through some sort of landscape and sort of bump into a fraction, a taste, a sugar egg scene from another dream. But before I can get a sense of what is going on in that scene, I'm back to wandering in the landscape.Recent dream:
I'm walking along a stone wall in a field. It's summer and everything smells like grass. I come to a tree with huge dark brown trunk. I stop to look at the bark, but then it's not bark. It's the scales of a huge lizard standing on its head, holding leaves in its hind claws. One eye is closed, one is open.
I kneel down in the grass to look closer into the open eye. I think I want to see if the lizard is OK. Reflected in the eye is a scene from my elementary school playground. Liza, Laura, Sarah, and I have climbed up the hill near the swing sets, and we're hiding under the lilacs. Liza is crying and none of us know why. And all of us are embarrassed that she's crying, so we're sitting in a row, staring out through the lilac branches with our arms hugging our knees.
Just before I can slip into that dream, I'm walking along the stone wall again.
There's a window hanging in mid air in front of me. I look through it. There's a dog trying to cross a street. I don't recognize the street, the dog or the scene. And then all I can see is the rest of the meadow through the now transparent window.
Then I'm walking along the stone wall again. Walking towards me is my high school boyfriend. He's wearing his constant uniform of a black turtleneck, gray shorts and Adidas sneakers. I can recognize him from his silhouette, but before I can figure out if he can see me from so far away, he's gone. I stop walking and look at the wall. A bunch of the stones have reflective surfaces, and about five of them are showing me scenes from my most common recurring dreams: a witch, a church bell, a lake, a bridge, a peacock, and a cat.
I don't know what to make of this. I feel as if I'm having some sort of smorgasbord dream. It's as if I'm being offered the choice to enter into those dreams, and that somehow I'm taking just a second too long in deciding before option goes away. Or maybe I'm being teased by the images? Or maybe I'm witnessing some sort of decluttering of a packed closet of dreams? Or maybe my mind is shuffling them in a bizarre flip book animation?
I actually think that I'm tacking the meadow and the wall on after the fact because I'm so used to experiencing a narrative dream. I don't think that I know HOW to remember a dream unless there's a narrative attached to it. So I think my conscious mind added the other stuff on to make the random images stick to one another.
Anyway. After I have these, I wake up and then can't fall back asleep.
They don't disturb me really; it's not as if I'm upset by them to the point where I can't sleep, but I find that I'm not tired enough after the dream to make it all the way back to sleep.
This has caused me to reread Laura Kinsale's The Shadow and the Star. Goddamn, that woman can write. For every obsessed protective "Alpha" hero who intrigues me but also scares me enough to creep me out (think Wrath), I always come back to Samuel. He works for me in ways that other protectively violent heroes do not. (Well, I'm also rereading Flowers from the Storm too. Christian's another one who works.) I could read the scene where Samuel asks Leda to try on the necklace, and then can't help himself once the back of his hand touches her hair, and gently and just barely holds her face in his hands as he looks at her face in the mirror again, and again, and not get goosebumps. (Hell, I just got a shiver up my back typing out that clumsy summary.)
So I guess insomnia's not so bad.
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