Cartography of Nightmare
Well, I’ve just had a delightful little experience in the mind. Just trying to be a good parent and family man I was. Responding to some sort of government directive to ensure that my family was prepared for an unspecified disaster of some nature – a tsunami perhaps, maybe an earthquake – quite unclear now. I’d been looking at inscrutable maps from some government file. Charts of topography, nautical features, a shoreline close to home. At some point I climbed a nearby hill and scanned the horizon with binoculars. Just over there, around and behind that small hill and across a little inlet. The answer was there. The question was very murky, but the need to investigate this particular locale was pressing, and could be kind of fun, I thought.
At first I suppose I was driving, then apparently on a bicycle. I recognized a couple of features. A run-down looking intersection – three way with a stop sign coming upon a little-used rural road . Jog right on the road – but something limiting progress in that direction. A dead-end of some kind. High vegetation. No, turn left on a roughly paved but lonely road, little more than a private drive, but no signs saying keep out or no trespassing. Here it gets a little weird. Ben Stiller is in my head with a running monologue. No memorable lines, just a nervous patter… idle jokes about dangerous places one shouldn’t be poking into… anecdotes of rural tragedy. I’m walking now and I’ve got company. Good thing it’s a cop, but for some reason he doesn’t have a patrol car. He’s on foot like me. I give him some mumbo jumbo about my investigation to satisfy the preparedness crap. He’s impressed enough to urge me to continue the investigation. We continue down the road. It’s getting quite dark. The road curves around. Things don’t look promising. I get my hackles up. I suggest – or maybe it was he – that it might be best to turn around and investigate another day. But wait. There’s a building. Red and yellow faded paint and signage. It appears to be an old foreign-run convenience store or something, vaguely Mexican perhaps. A door hangs open and there is soft light inside. Everything getting nearly black outside of that doorway. The cop says he’ll take a look. I stand and wait.
Now it’s dead silent and black as pitch. Literally can’t see a hand in front of my face. The cop seems to be back because something brushes up against me. I hear a soft voice, almost a whisper, speaking in a strong foreign accent, “I… I… want to thank you…”
I start to say “you’re welcome” perfunctorily, when a terrified thought shoots through me. Who the hell is this and WHAT HAPPENED TO THE COP!?!?
Awake in cold sweat.
Good time to go downstairs. Might just stay up a little while.
The weird thing is how recognizable that intersection was. And so close to home. Very weird place the mind.
Excellent tale, and an odd moment in it for me — my brain saw ‘Ben S -’ and immediately put in ‘Ben Stein’. I gasped with the absolute fucking horror of being subjected to a Ben Stein monoloque, and your dream took on Nosferatu vibes until I re-read the ‘Ben’ properly, and realized it was Ben Stiller.
Now, to me, Ben Stiller as a guiding voice is incredibly comforting and positive. The dream became joyful and beautiful, immediately upon the switch.
Quantum Physics would probably treat this as some sort of excursion into a neighboring Max-Reality. Curious.
Ben Stein. Shudder. What a Monotonous Demon Of Drooling Orc-Hatred. Seriously. I don’t think there’s any person quite like him — quietly, boringly, drippingly hateful and evil. A Truly Bad Person.
Apparently you were there to be thanked? By some foreign guy?
Comment on September 28, 2011 @ 9:28 am
The dream was rather delightful while Ben was hanging out with me. It was when he wisely booked out that it took on a chill. Ben Stein… yeah that would be frightening. Stop giving my subconscious ammunition would you?
Interestingly, the thanker didn’t seem to be threatening at all – until I was struck by the thought that he might have offed the cop.
Comment on September 28, 2011 @ 10:25 am
Remarkable detail, but I can honestly say I’ve never had Ben Stiller OR Ben Stein make an appearance in my dreams… and what would Freud make of that 3-way intersection?
I know what you mean about waking up from a bad dream and, even if still tired, preferring fatigue to re-entering whatever dark place had occupied my head…
One thing I learned from a recent PBS special on ‘What Are Dreams?’ was that REM dreams tend to occur early in the sleep cycle, and often tend to be negative and/or self-demeaning, while ‘deeper’ sleep usually produces more positive, self-reinforcing fantasies. This may be why insomnia and depression are often associated… and if you can’t sleep long enough to get to a more benign space, that darker outlook may tend to influence waking life in a negative way.
So it’s just possible instead of drugs like ‘Prozac’ ‘serotonin re-uptake inhibitors’ (which never helped me anyway), it might be more productive to figure out ways to get people to just sleep better… WITHOUT sleeping ‘aids’ (eg: drugs) which tend to blank out dreams altogether… Better sleep may be much more important to our general well-being than most suppose. Just a thought…
Comment on September 28, 2011 @ 11:43 am
Now that is interesting. I’ve identified a somewhat consistent pattern in some of my dreams, particularly the ones that I’d end up considering as nightmares. They usually begin with a sense of adventure and exhilaration and, often, an awareness of something quite benign and often beautiful. At some point there is a rather sudden turn and what had been beautiful becomes dangerous and even terrifying. The classic case is my recurrent big cat dreams where the lion, tiger, or panther was first noticed for its beauty and grace and I am tempted to get closer to it, even to stroke its fur. As it gains proximity I am suddenly reminded of its extreme danger and then it turns on me.
Another odd case occurred a couple of nights ago. I was on a movie set in an arid, mountainous region, like southern Utah but with high ridges and glorious vistas. The director had constructed an amazing temple of some kind, something shaped like the head and torso of an ape (some Planet of the Apes remake no doubt). It was all breathtaking and inspiring, but I had no sense of fear. A little later I was walking along one of the ridges and my brother (Aldus) and brother-in-law were accompanying me. I came upon a ditch cutting across the ridge with a kind of pothole, covered with a carpet. Removing the carpet I saw water within rushing toward the cliff face to my right. Next thing I know I’m slipping into the hole and have gone in up to my armpits. At first it was a laughing matter, then I felt the power of the stream and realized I was powerless to get out of the hole. I called for my companions with a growing sense of urgency to come closer and pull me out. Then I had the shocking awareness that there was really no hope for me… the ground was eroding too quickly and even worse, if my companions tried to save me they would inevitably be pulled in with me and all of us would be washed over the side to our deaths. In that instance I faced a horrifying dilemma, the only solution to which was to wake up, which I succeeded in doing forthwith.
Perhaps these kind of dreams are an exception to the pattern you describe from the PBS documentary, but it’s clear that in these cases the nice part of the dream came first, not later in what should have been deeper sleep. Last night’s dream came only a couple hours after I fell asleep. I don’t think it was heading toward a benign place.
Comment on September 28, 2011 @ 9:19 pm
Definitely REM.
Comment on September 29, 2011 @ 1:55 am