One Over X News

Nocturnal Delusions

I gave Sarah, my youngest, a ride home from school yesterday. I try to do that on my days off. It is only a little less than 2 miles from home to school so it is not impossible for her to walk home but it has been chilly in central Florida lately. What are dads for?

On the way home in my recently repaired truck, (replaced battery and alternator within the last month) we were listening to the radio that now worked for the first time in three weeks (it had Theft Lock activated by the loss of power -what a pain in the...) . A local Orlando DJ was mentioning nightmares. So it became a point for some brief discussion. I don't think Sarah totally believed me when I told her that I have not had a nightmare (at least that I remember) in over 25 years. Certainly I remember the last one and it was how that dream ended that may have fixed the internal wiring of my brain so that I do not have bad dreams.

I know, I know, you're all skeptical too. Some of you may be saying to yourselves that judging from the subjects of some of my stories I have my nightmares while I am writing. I suppose that is a possible way of looking at it. Writing is a cathartic experience sometime and moreover a very healthy way to exorcise demons. I was having a strange dream in early September, 1979, probably about 11 years before Sarah's birthday. I had recently moved to Austin and had just started classes at The University of Texas. I was a avid reader at that point. I had re-read Lord of the Rings over the course of the summer. I had just started to read Steven R. Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Convenant. To this day those are two of my favorite series of books.

In the dream that I had I was being chased through a parking lot, dodging between parked cars as viscious animals were biting at my legs. I ducked into an apartment complex that was oddly like the one in which I was living in real life and ran up a flight of stairs and along a balcony that overlooked a common area that contained a swimming pool around which a number of tenants that were sunbathing. Out of breath and panting, I looked back to see if the animals were still giving chase and suddenly I felt a tap in my shoulder. As I turned back I was facing someone that looked a lot like me, only a little older. It was only then that I noticed that I was no longer at the apartment complex but instead I was standing on the upper landing of a stairway in a campus bookstore.

For those astute enough to notice, some of this dream made it into Book 1.

The other 'me' explained how dreams work and how they are pieced together from the peripherally perceived but hardly registered fragments of daily experience. The mind accesses all those images as symbols to create a weird sort of strategy for filtering, sorting and otherwise dealing with unassociated thoughts. Whether that is the case matters little. From that morning onward I have not had a nightmare and whenever a dream even begins to venture toward the strange, I am able to wake up within the dream and tell myself that it is a dream.

I'll bet 'Freddie Kruger' wouldn't like having me around all that much.

As synchronicity would have it I had a strange dream last night that for anyone else might have registered as a nightmare. I was not in a panic at any point during the course of the dream. I seemed to be aware for most of the dream that it was a dream. And I do not become overly concerned that I am a character in my dreams and that I do things that I would not normally expect. I completely understand that I am a metaphore for the protagonist in the dreamworld. I have understood that for sometime. It might be news to some of you but whomever you seem to be in your dream is may not always represent you.

In the dream it seemed that I was staying in a house that had a floor plan was very similar to that of my childhood home near the village of Selma, Ohio. In that house there was a breezeway that connected with the garage. It had been enclosed, perhaps even when the house was constructed, I do not know. There were black and white pictures of me in little bibbed Osh Kosh overalls crying my eyes out because I had sat down in the glue that my father was using in order to apply black and while resilient tiles to the concrete floor in a checkerboard pattern. That 'breezeway' had a front door and a back door and decorative knotty pine walls. It served as the home's familyroom for the almost nine years that we lived there.

In the dream there was a drywall partition erected in the middle of the room, effectively cutting the room in half. On the backside of the wall was a matress that served as a bed, I seemed to know that it was my personal space. It had the feel of something temporary though, as if it were only a short term accomodation, for a summer perhaps.

I remember that when I was ten there was a bed set there, in the same relative corner of the room. It was for my second cousin Norman Daniels to sleep while he and his brother Marvin were there for the summer building our new family home on Jamestown Road, closer to South Charleston, on a parcel of land that belonged to a farm that my father had just purchased and much closer to the main farms concentration of farms that my father operated. I had to give up my bed to Marvin for the entire summer and so I spent every night sleeping on a piece of foam rubber laid down on the hardwood floor in the livingroom. Maybe there is some connectivity in there between the dream and the past but it is a stretch.

I think the next part was so out of place that it clued me into suspecting that I must be dreaming. There was a blood stain on the patition and several punctures into the wall that appeared to have been made with a hunting knife. The blood stain surrounded only one puncture that was to the right side but halfway between the highest and the lowest punctures. The blood had dripped down onto the floor that was carpeted in a sand colored berber, just like the carpet in my present dwelling here in Satellite Beach, FL. I was staring at the pattern that oddly looked like the outline of the State of Israel. The blood came from the puncture that roughly would approximate the location of city of Jerusalem.

As i glanced down to the floor I was wondering who could have done such a thing and where had the blood come from. I was very worried abouit the blood stain of course and how I was ever going to get the stain out of the carpet. I distinctly remmeber thinking that I do not own the house and I am a guest.

As I stood there my attention was drawn toward the glint of light that reflected from a full length mirror. There I saw my reflection, except that I was clean shaven (I currently have a full beard) and that the front of my shirt was soaked in blood, my own blood that in near disbelief I realized was spurting with the pulse of my heartbeat from my slit throat. I looked down at my hand that was also covered with blood and realized that I was holding the sort of knife that had stabbed the wall and that I had apparently used it to slit my own throat.

I staggered with the realization that I must have lost a lot of blood. I stumbled over to the matress and collapsed onto it, fully expecting to die from my self-inflicted wound. It did not make sense to me. Why would slit my own throat, what did it have to do with the wall or the apparent reference to Israel? Why was the blood dripping from Jerusalem?

Whatever the reason, I was still lying there and bleeding but I was not dying. I heard a car pull up and the commotion of others outside. Jina came into the room and I jumped up, startled to see her and the kids. She looked at me and said something very strange like, "Now you ahve done it."

I asked her to call for help.

It was about then that I woke up within the dream, detatched as if I was observing characters acting out their roles in a play. It was a vivid dream and it had elements that were troubling but it was hardly a nightmare, at least not by my standards. To me a nightmare has to startle you from sleep in a heart pounding panic and cold sweat. I awakened from dreaming much as I would at any other time that I am finished with my nap.

What I had was a nocturnal delusion, not a nightmare at all.

I am not one to long dwell on the possible reason or meaning of dreams. That is not to say that a dream like this one would not give me reason to wonder for a little bit. I know I could easily find all sorts of symbolism in it. Let's leave it at that for the time being.

Anyone that would like to interpret the dream for me, have fun with it. Let me know if you come up with anything prophetic.

As I suggested earlier, some of the strange dreams find their way into a book eventually, though they are usually so greatly altered as to hardly seem akin to the origin. The section of Book 1 titled Seawall is based on a dream that I had in the around the first of July 1977, eleven years before Rob, my son was born. I personally think it was a dream about the origin of life. I could be wrong, though.

When I was at The University of Texas, I had any number of strange dreams but one stands out only because it would present a very strong case for a dream serving as a promonition, soemthing that I am not sure I even believe in. It also stands out because it was a dream that I had recorded in my journals and by actual date. It happened on November 9, 1979, exactly ten years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. I have thought a little about this one becasue it was so vivid and realistic. Dreams usually aren't that way at all.

Let's begin with this: my birthday in 1979 was the 34th anniversary of the end of the war in Europe, which is pertinent in some way that I will suggest later.

I dreamed that I was in a room with people from several other countries. I particularly remember seeing the little flags sitting on a table in front of the other members of the conferrence and remember the Union Jack and the Maple Leaf so I know Great Brritain and Canada were there. It appeared to be a conferrence of some sort and we were discussing the problems associated with restructuring the German government to accomodate the reorientation of resources from the former Communist sectors that were to be annexed into a reunified federal republic. I was having a conversation with someone from Canada and said something to the effect that re-educating two generations of people that have never known anything except Communism would be the real challenge.

I remember being so taken with the clarity of the dream that following my next American Foriegn Policies class I discussed it with my instructor. He laughed in response to it and generally dismissed it as it was a dream anyway. He said, "A couple of generations, well that would put it in the next decade now wouldn't it? I wouldn't hold my breath that it was a premonition or anything that might prove true. It was only a dream. There is a very complex situation over there and not one that would be resolved even within the next two or three decades. I am afraid there will likely be two Germany's for a very, very long time."

I have wondered if that instructor even remembers the conversation that we had. When I was in the service I told a few people about the dream. I mentioned it to a couple of the people that I worked with in the intelligence community. The general concensus was that it was merely a dream and who in their right mind would put a lot of faith in the substance of a dream. No one expected what happened or that it could happen quite as rapidly as it did. After the fact it is pointless to say that I knew it would happen. I really did not believe that it was possible either. Except that I had a strange dream that made me ask if it was possible, I would have never believed it either. When it happened I remember thinking that I had been given a gift of premonition and had done little or nothing with it.

To complete what I suggested previously, there is another little synchronistic element to the dream about the reunification of Germany. I was 34 years old when the Berlin Wall fell. It was on the tenth anniversary of the dream.

Over recent years I haven't paid a good deal of attention to my dreams. I am really skeptical about dreams having relevance and meaning. I play with that idea in my books and I even sometimes poke some fun at it. I know for a certainty that people who focus only on their dreams are doomed to miss a good deal of the signals that come directly from life. I suppose dreams need to be put into context. It is all part of the information that you have to understand the world around you and your reaction to it.

Having said all that I write my dreams down and they often end up in my books, eventually. The impetus for much of the Wolf parts of the series One Over X were sourced in dreams. The inspiration for all of it was nevertheless Ela'na. Even so I had many dreams about Wolves during the summer of 2000. A lot of that made it into the series.

Sweet Dreams to one and all.

E

posted by Unknown @ 8:15 AM