Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Dreams

All throughout my life I've either been cursed or blessed... depending on your POV... with a general inability to remember my dreams.  I've done a little light reading on the subject and know enough to understand we ALL dream and roughly half of us remember every minute detail of our unconscious nocturnal adventures.  Not me.  Not usually.  Until lately, that is.  Over the course of the last month or so my dreams have been vivid enough to wake me up and some small bits and pieces of those dreams remain in memory.  I'll relate a small part of last night's dream in a minute, but first a digression.

The Second Mrs. Pennington was (is?) one of those types who recall their dreams in exquisite detail.  Her dreams were the subject for conversation over our morning coffee... every morning.  It was part of my duties and responsibilities as consort to listen semi-attentively to her strange and weird experiences; things would NOT have gone well if I had been less than interested.  Which, truth be told, I was... less than interested.  Some people may find it fascinating that you were trapped in a dark hallway with no apparent way out and the terror this situation inspired but I'm not among that select few.  But I did listen.  Duty and obligation.

The thing that always captured my attention, however, were those rare occurrences where I starred in her dreams and acted in an uncharacteristic manner... which is to say less than loving or outright cold, cruel, or callous... depending on the situation.  My response in those cases was "Hey!  I'm not responsible for what I do in your dreams!"  To which she would always reply "Oh but you are. Yes you ARE!"  I think she was serious, too.  End of digression.

So... last evening I was involved in a sort of French aristocratic tableau, where all the characters looked like the ones you see on the right and we were wandering around premises... both in and outdoors... that looked a lot like the image of the château below.

There were quite a few cameo appearances by people from my past but the chief actors in this dream-play were TSMP, her parents, my parents, and (of course) me.  The dream had that "endless flow of time" character that made it seem to go on forever... vignette after vignette that replayed our breakup in semi-slow motion and in the most exotic of surroundings.  There were interventions by her parents and mine, which is odd because our parents were dead when we ended, rather lengthy soliloquies on TSMP's part rationalizing her behavior and so on.  I won't bore you with more detail except for two odd images.  

The Château de Sceaux... where I played as a child.  Connections?

The first: my father was wearing an intricate, finely tooled leather cigar holster (?) from which he would periodically withdraw a lit cigar as he strode around the room, take a couple of draws on it and return it to its place.  I (virtually) thought "I need one of those!"

The second, which was the dream's final scene and the one that woke me up: TSMP was outdoors in a garden seated at a bench writing in a large gilded ledger... and this is after all the shit had hit the fan.  I walked up to her and asked what she was doing.  "This is the final entry in our book," she replied.  I looked down and saw the following... in large, bright red flowing script... "I was only playing at love."

Well.  You ARE responsible for your behavior in my dreams, Darling.  I understand where you were coming from now.

12 comments:

  1. E-yikes.

    Start drafting the screenplay!

    And patent that cigar-holster-thingy.

    ReplyDelete
  2. My first thought was, ohhhh, you are just making sh** up!!

    No, I'm kidding. (I'm at work, of course, so I get a little cranky)

    But I like the castle!!

    Anyway -- I'm sure that everything means something deep and dark and dredgable (new word) from your past, but, truly, it's probably somebody's birthday or it was your anniversary or you saw a chicken. Yanno?

    Is there REALLY a rhyme, a reason, a true belief that we can ever understand what's in our own heads, let alone someone else's??

    My dreams I do remember in the mornings, but, yes, they tend to dissipate quickly -- except for teh one about the guy getting stabbed in the forehead. Hmmm.

    Oh, well! I still like the castle. :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Moogie: I have a LOT of potential screenplays in my repertoire but precious few of them are less than "R" rated.

    Kath: A true fact for ya: I NEVER make shit up. In the rare occasions where I modify the truth, however slightly, it is so indicated. It's a fetish with me.

    That château was a fun place to play as a child and was about a 15 minute walk from my house, believe it or don't.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I am one of those vivid dreamers who remembers everything. I learned how to interpret my own dreams so that I wouldn't be tortured by them in my waking hours.

    I find that it's the things that stick out the most - the things you remember in nauseating detail - that are the important things from dreams. The rest is just background and texture - mostly informed from something that occurred during the day preceding the dream. A news story you read about France could have prompted all the visuals around that.

    IMHO, It's the ledger and TSMP's message. I think you probably know what it means - you're a pretty smart guy.

    New beginnings Buck, new beginnings.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Moogie beat me to it. I saw the dream as inspiration for you to invent the burning cigar holster.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I think you probably know what it means - you're a pretty smart guy.

    The head knows and understands, Kris... the heart much less so. Twenty-three years is one helluva long time and it seems to take forever to erase. If it's even possible.

    BR: That holster thing really stuck with me... it was SO odd, yet so cool!

    ReplyDelete
  7. Hmmm...thanks for writing this, Buck.

    I know that this is some deep stuff, and I have at least a half an idea about it all...which for me is about twice as much of an idea as I usually have.

    I am a vivid dream rememberer. I dream almost every night. Most of them make no sense at all, and usually involve Abraham Lincoln, my Granddaddy, and squirrels (and, I'm not kidding). But, they ALL feature people from the past that are completely out of place in time. Say, my Granddaddy visiting with my youngest son, or with FDIL (who were both born after he died), etc.

    This is interesting, Buck. I appreciate the subtlety of the way you wrote it, too.

    ReplyDelete
  8. I remember my dreams; Toby does not. When he does remember one, it kind of freaks him out. Your dream is a bit freaky, too. I don't try to figure what they mean, but I do try to figure out where they come from - things in our concsience or sub-con.

    ReplyDelete
  9. No, I don't think you would make stuff up, not unless you told it was a story ahead of time.

    Anyway, that castle and your dream make me think of Robert Goulet and If Ever I Would Leave You -- I think it's from Camelot. (Sigh.)

    ReplyDelete
  10. One of the teevee tropes I despise the most has to do with a psychological disorder in which people sabotage their own relationships because someone else "got too close." It's not that I disbelieve in it, I just think lately it's been done to death. And it really raises my cackles when people deliver lines that diagnose themselves. Especially the puppy-face men that young stupid girls find to be appealingly harmless. "Sorry I pushed you away, I guess I tend to do that when someone gets too close."

    Well, way back many a year ago, I was married, and my wife had a dream kinda like that. Sort of the opposite of yours. Seems I was getting too close. That's one of the problems with husbands, you know? ;-) Yeah, the separation came not too long after that. It's nineteen years later, I really can't tell you if she's living or dead, and I think we both like it that way.

    ReplyDelete
  11. ...seems to take forever to erase.

    Buck - you shouldn't erase it. Not even close. Somehow you'll find the way to cherish the good times and relegate the bad to some other place that doesn't intrude on living your life. Perhaps the dream was a way of telling you that it could be time to start that process.

    I know from a different - and fresh - perspective how you feel. I don't mean to sound trite at all. I just have a tendency to want to help everyone...

    ReplyDelete
  12. Andy: Thank you for the kind words on the subtlety. We tries, we do.

    Lou: I know all too well where these sorts of dreams come from. It's just weird that I remember them these days.

    Kath: You would have to be the Goulet expert in these parts. I never saw "Camelot."

    Morgan: I've never understood that "too close" thing. It's a stupid-ass meme, as you noted.

    Perhaps the dream was a way of telling you that it could be time to start that process.

    That process has been a work in progress for many a year now, Kris, and progress is slow.

    ReplyDelete

Just be polite... that's all I ask.