Only in Dreams

The past few weeks I have had the strangest dreams.  Or, should I say, I have remembered the strangest dreams.  I don’t know if it’s that I have been sleeping more fitfully, waking up at more regular intervals and thereby interrupting the process of my dream and making me remember, or just that my mind is trying to tell me something.  If it’s the latter, I think what it is trying to tell me is that there are some people I am angry at and I have a strange obsession with water sports of all kinds.

I have recently had two dreams in which I told off people who had wronged me, or perhaps people who I perceive to have wronged me.  The first one, the more detailed dream, made a lot of sense.  I have rehearsed in my head the very conversation that occurred in my dream.  Only, when I imagine the conversation I believe he will argue with me about how wrong I am, how I misperceived things, how I didn’t see what I know I saw.  In the dream though, he just sat there calmly while I told him what was what.  Didn’t defend himself, just sat there.  And this is because I’m right and he’s wrong and dream him realizes it.  Which is awesome.  Dream him is so much more agreeable than real him.  This closure that I have wanted to get for so long, that I know would only succeed in making me seem like a crazy person, was achieved in a dream state.  Hopefully that’s all that was needed.  Hopefully I won’t have another dream in which I push him down a flight of stairs because that is another thing I have fantasized about here and there.  Violence, whether in real life or dream life, is not good.  Or so I’m told.  The other dream, however, was sort of out of left field.  The person who I yelled at is someone who I am happy to not have in my life anymore, someone who was more of a detriment to my happiness than anything else.  I tend to operate by the theory that if you have a relationship with someone, any kind of relationship, and more often than not you leave an interaction feeling worse or less happy than you did when you entered it, it’s probably not a relationship you need to be in.  I was never happy after I saw this person.  Ever.  So why the dream closure?  Who knows but it was awesome.  And, the extra great thing about it was that, at least in this one dream, dream Rebekah was exactly the same as real Rebekah!  I told the girl off, and then I went around, in my dream, and told all my dream friends about what had happened.  I even embellished a little to make the story better!  It’s nice to know that in a dream state I exhibit remarkable consistency.

And now on to water sports.  As some of you who know me might know, I love love love the Olympics.  Specifically the summer Olympics.  I have even assembled my ideal women’s gymnastics team.  (I have also discovered that when you tell people you have assembled your ideal women’s gymnastics team they think you are a little bit of a freak so it is best to just keep it to yourself.)  Anyway, a few weeks ago I had a dream that I was in an Olympic sailboat race.  Not only was I in the race, but I won.  Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you are reading the blog of a dream-Olympics gold medal sailor.  And I did it on a Sunfish, no less.  You might ask why, of all the Olympic sports, and considering my obvious obsession with gymnastics, I would have a dream in which I sailed.  I do not have an answer to that question.  I don’t think I have set foot on a sailboat, Sunfish or otherwise, since summer camp in the early 90s.  But let me tell you one thing I know for sure:  winning Olympic gold is awesome.  What’s even more awesome is that when I woke up there was like a 5 second period during which I actually thought I had won Olympic gold in real life.  Those 5 seconds were totally great.  And when I realized I had neither attended the Olympics nor won the event, I wasn’t even let down!  I was just super impressed by my own imagination.  I went from congratulating myself for winning to congratulating myself for being a really good dreamer.  Gold medal caliber, even.

Then, two nights ago I had yet another dream.  In this dream, a friend of mine was pregnant.  Very pregnant.  The weird part of the dream was that in her rather large state she insisted on swimming a 100-lap race.  In open water.  Without goggles.  (And no, it was not part of the Olympics…it was just your regular, every day, run-of-the-mill 100-lap open water race.  For fun.)  I don’t know why she wasn’t wearing goggles.  I don’t know why she was in the race – she isn’t a swimmer in real life.  I also don’t know whether or not she won because a 100-lap race takes a really long time to finish, in a dream or otherwise.  What I do know is that she was doing a damn good job last I saw.  Maybe the dream-baby added to her buoyancy.

Anyway, that’s it for this first and, likely not last, installation of my dream journal.  Going forward I hope for more water sports and less anger.

Tags: dream, sailboat races, summer Olympics, Sunfish, swimming, water sports, women's gymnastics