Dream On Baby

I am one of those fortunate people who regularly experiences vivid, adventurous and exciting dreams which I usually remember in detail the following morning. Much of my unconscious life is spent gallivanting and cavorting around the planet meeting old friends and doing the oddest things. Usually the dreams reflect some part of my waking life in one form or another. I sort through day to day problems and issues in my dreams and "sleeping on it" really does help. A few years ago a friend and I were working on a computer game and we faced a particularly difficult logic puzzle that neither of us could solve. That night I dreamt about the puzzle, came down the next morning with the solution and solved it in a minute. Love that!

I have two recurring dreams that happen when I'm particularly anxious about something in my life. In one of them I'm trapped in the subway in Toronto at Yonge and Bloor and can't find my way out. I go up and down escalators and all through The Bay department store frantically looking for an exit but never get out of the building. In the other dream, I'm back working as a waitress in some restaurant that I don't know. The place is packed, it's lunch time and I'm in the weeds. I'm the only server working and I'm totally out of control. I have customers angry at me and the kitchen is yelling at me. It's a veritable nightmare. If I don't know I am anxious about something and I have one of those dreams -I sure do afterward.

Often my dreams are fun and quirky. Last night, for example, was quite surreal. It was just before Christmas on a snowy Friday evening at the end of a work day and I was hitch hiking home with a six-pack of airplane-sized Jack Daniel's bottles to give as presents to drivers who picked me up. When I was dropped off on the corner of a street in NYC, I decided to go and rob an office building to get money for a Christmas turkey (I was broke). In the safe were all the bonus cheques for the staff and a bunch of expense account credit cards - obviously Christmas gifts for the party that night. As I was climbing out of the office window with my booty, I cut my hand on a piece of broken glass and was leaving big drops of blood in the white snow. I needed a band-aid badly so I popped into a Christmas party down the street. I handed the doorperson what was left of my six-pack and went to mingle with the crowd, forgetting about my cut hand. The first person I saw was John Lennon standing in the corner with some pretty blond in a black and white polka dot mini dress. John looked as though he'd just stepped out of the movie "Yellow Submarine". He looked Fab! It occurred to me for a second that it would be quite rude to interrupt them but I didn't care - it was John Lennon for crying out loud! In my haste to get over to him and as I was pulling my camera out of my backpack, bonus cheques went flying around the room. I mumbled an apology as I pushed the polka dot dress aside and grabbed John's hand bringing his fingers to my lips. I noticed he was quite short and told him so. He replied in his Liverpudlian accent "Yeah, well that happens if you haven't seen someone since you were seven, doesn't it"? I asked him about Paul McCartney and he said Paul should be arriving soon. We talked for a bit about nothing in particular and I took a few pictures of him and then in walked Paul McCartney dressed in a bright turquoise suit with lime green lining, an orange shirt and yellow tie - the colours, incidentally that the Beatles are wearing on the cover of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band". I ran over to him and gave him a kiss on the cheek and acted much to my embarrassment like a star struck groupie. He settled himself into a big white fluffy chair and held court surrounded by sixties go-go girls. I was the official Eastman-Kodak girl snapping all the shots. Then I woke up. How funny is that?

I love dreaming about celebrities - the other day I had a long conversation with Barbra Streisand in the back of a cab on the way to a party (lots of parties in my dreams, not so much in my awake  life). She was delightful but uncharacteristically frumpy. Years ago I dreamt about dancing with Michael Jackson on ice skates to Billie Jean. We were awesome!

In life my Mother and I had a complicated, sometimes difficult relationship. At the time of her death in 2009 we hadn't seen each other in eight years and had only spoken a handful of times but you wouldn't know it by my dreams. She is with me maybe three nights a week. Sometimes we are together in the present and more often than not, it's in the past. I consult her a lot and she is front and centre in my mind. I often dream about both of my dead cats CC and Ziggy too. The other night CC was running around the room catching rainbow coloured angel fish that were the size of a quarter flying at knee level around the living room. He was having great fun and grinning like a Cheshire cat. Ziggy often curls up in bed with me as she used to and in half sleep I can feel her and hear her purring. Many of my friends show up in my dreams regularly, which is especially comforting as I live so far away from them all and miss them like crazy.

In Guatemala, land of the Tzutujil Maya no one disregards his or her dreams. If dreams are overly disturbing or more powerful than usual, or if they startle you awake, then shamans are called in for a ritual interpretation. To the shamans, dreams are the backbone of their way of life. Their dreams are rarely taken literally and must be properly read. So says shaman Martin Prechtel whose wonderful book "Secrets Of The Talking Jaguar", I just finished reading. He also tells us, and I believe it, that although the landscape may be different in our dream world than that of the awake world, it is actually the balanced opposite, reversed version, where our souls live out our bodies' lives reenacted as if in a mirror. "Like the two opposing wings of a butterfly, the dream-world is one wing and the awake world is another wing. The butterfly must have both wings connected at the Heart in order to fly and function".

Dreams, according to the Maya, are thought to be a direct, incorruptible expression of the mysterious nature of life and are considered to be free of human connivance. Because of this, dreams are trusted more than people. I don't know about all that, but I do know my dreams are always telling me something true about myself - sometimes things I have not yet faced in my awake life. If I pay attention to my dreams they help me in the process of connecting body, mind and spirit and trying to be being aware and present in my life. I do love the colourful twists and turns my dreams take sometimes and I wonder what the shamans would make out of grinning Cheshire cats, flying angel fish and six-packs of airplane miniatures?

Sweet dreams to all.