Dream Gina

No weight today. We thought it was the battery again, but we should have realized it was too soon for that. Nope, now the scale is broken. It might not be so bad, except we finally got the lawnmower replaced, only to have the dryer and vacuum break, and then Mom is going to require a lot of work on her car. Now we have been very blessed to have the dryer go out in the summer, when we can hang the laundry outside, and I know the scale is really very minor, but come on! Can we get a break here? Okay, rant over.

A friend of mine on Facebook just posted that she had a strange dream about me, where we were at the mall, and someone damaged my car so we were waiting around to confront them and the police came. The problems with this dream are that I don’t spend a lot of time at the mall, I don’t have a car, and I’m unlikely to get involved in a police incident, but she knew the dream was weird too.

This is actually less weird than some other dreams I have appeared in. Tricia once had one where I was teaching Sunday School, but I was smoking. People were a little freaked out, and I was snapping that I was trying to make a point, and they needed to give me a minute. That would be very uncharacteristic behavior.

More recently, Karen had a dream where I was naked. This one actually made perfect sense, which we both grasped right away. She is amazed by my openness, and sometimes worries about how vulnerable I am making myself, so that is a perfectly logical way for her to see me. If I dream myself naked, that means I am feeling vulnerable, but if you think about it, open and vulnerable go together so well they are practically synonyms, so it still works.

The interesting thing to me is that in the dreams of others I am doing things that I wouldn’t do, but when I dream about people they are usually being very much themselves, behaving in very typical ways. More than once I have relayed a dream to my sisters and had them ask “Are you sure that was a dream?” Not that they think I confused a dream event with a real event, but just that it all sounds so probable.

I have been pondering about dreams today because that difference is interesting to me. Now many people will tell you that in a dream, all of the other characters are really you. I’m not sure that’s really the case, though I think it holds with Karen’s dream. Yes, I truly am open, and she truly does care about me, but I think on another level she desires to be more open and is held back from it. That is why I did not bother asking her whether I looked good, even though I was a little curious.

So why doesn’t my family do anything wild and crazy? Maybe I know them too well for them to make good blank canvases. I’m not sure how much I have written about this, but about the time I was finishing up the document (you know, the one where I analyzed every aspect of my life for 200 pages) I had a dream that became the basis for my first screenplay. At the time, I thought it was just a sign that I was ready to move on, and really start my writing career because I had worked out all that stuff. That is probably true, but there may be more to it.

In the dream, I was walking down a street in Italy next to Barry, who is in a wheelchair. There was some sort of magic thing in a safe, and what would open the safe was a mask, and although he was supposed to be doing this as a job for someone else, his motivation was that the object he was after could help him to walk again. We were arguing because he wanted to just steal the mask, which I felt was wrong and impractical. (The supernatural elements did not end up being part of the screenplay, but the arguing did.)

I was concerned that I might have borrowed the thing with the mask from somewhere else, because it was such a strong image, so I asked if it sounded familiar to anyone on the IMBD message boards. One old friend there posted something interesting. He said the real question was what my mask was, and what treasure would come from uncovering it.

Well, a writing career would be a real treasure, but you could say that there has been more to it. For one thing, I thought finishing that document was it, and I was done, but then I found the need to revisit so many of the issues in the blog. I did need to be more open. I wouldn’t call myself a particularly dishonest person before, because I wasn’t in the habit of telling lies, but there was so little that I shared.

Now, it’s more like what have I not shared? And that may not be the answer for everyone, but it was necessary for me. I still don’t quite have my writing career, but I have a lot more courage and happiness, and I think I have helped some people, so there is treasure there.

Perhaps a more interesting question is “Why Barry?” We weren’t particularly close. Now, I suppose he may not have been acting like himself, because I don’t think he is a steal first, apologize later kind of guy. He was an interesting part of the process though, because later on I felt like I needed to tell him about the dream, and I did, but I realized I had not told him enough, so I needed to write him a note later. Becoming more open has been kind of a journey for me.

Maybe I should spend some more time paying attention to how others act in my dreams, to see if there are some keys there. If I know my family members too well for them to vary, maybe it will be different with non-family members. I do have a dream journal, though I am not consistent with it. Right now, I have just been having random image dreams, that fade away as soon as I wake up, so there has not been anything to write. That will change again.

I will say that if my dreams are special, and people are consistent with their true selves in them, especially if they are the same in each dream, then “Mitch”, you do love me. For crying out loud will you quit fighting it?