Last night I dreamt that I went with some people on a road trip to Disney World. We only stayed a few days though, and I became frustrated that there wasn’t time to do everything I wanted to. I had, however, visited the Haunted Mansion twice.
On the way home I fell asleep, and when I woke up, the people I was with were now my family, and we were driving through St. Louis, which is most certainly not on the way home from Florida, and my brother and I made fun of my dad for this. Nevertheless I had identified the city by spotting the Gateway Arch, which in this dream seemed a good deal thicker than its real life counterpart, and I wanted to get out of the car and use my digital camera to take a picture.
After we parked, I wandered several blocks closer to the river (the actual city was on the other side) until I reached the waterfront, where there were several ticket booths vending passes to local shows, including a few goth-looking concerts. Stretching across the water toward the city ahead of us were a pair of grandiose, multi-tiered stone bridges, elaborately built of pillars and arches in such a way that they looked like a wall removed from the Roman Colisseum, but much larger.
I attempted to snap my photo of the engorged Arch, but every time I got it in frame, something got in the way…a passing person’s head or a passing ship on the water…indeed the city itself seemed to shift in such a way as to conceal the Arch from my view by placing buildings in front of it. I attempted to rise above all this mischief by standing atop a small chain-link fence nearby, but as I balanced precariously atop this thin metallic perch, each time I raised the camera to my eye I became unbalanced and had to grip the fence to keep from falling. Night fell, and now I was riding some ersatz futuristic monorail-type vehicle that raced around the city in a circle, trying to find a good angle–any angle. I never did get that picture, and I woke up lamenting the lost opportunity.
Now, I have never been a believer in any deep, cosmic significance of dreams. I don’t think dreams are my brain “trying to tell me something” or messages from the hereafter. This isn’t because I lack any taste for the spiritual…quite the opposite. It’s simply because I, like many others I assume, have experienced the dreaming “process” on a more conscious level: daydreaming. I’m not talking about “I wish I was far away from here” mind wandering, but actual dreaming without falling asleep, where your mind is transported into some surreal situation in such a way that you are not fully conscious that it’s not actually happening, and when you snap out of it you need a moment to re-orient yourself and remember that no, you weren’t just flying over the Manhattan skyline with a jetpack, you were sitting at your desk staring blankly at the screen trying desperately to think of something to write for your website.
When this occurs, it’s always a lot easier to remember and track the thought processes that led to the daydream than it is with sleeping dreams. For example, I might suddenly awaken from a daydream in which I was trying to help the orangutan from Project X escape before they took him away and irradiated him, and I did this by giving him a cucumber with which to unlock the cage. Pretty surreal. But then I’ll remember: “I was thinking about my trip to the Franklin Park Zoo last year, and the gorillas, and how gorillas are supposed to eat bananas, and how I have some bananas in the kitchen, so then I was at the zoo and gave the gorilla one, but it was too green, and now the gorilla is the orangutan and the green banana is a cucumber (how did I make that mistake at the store?), but the cucumber is just mashing up against the lock, oh hurry Virgil hurry! *snap* Huh? Wha???”
So when you can remember exactly what thoughts contributed collectively into the surreal whole of the dream, it kind of de-mystifies the whole concept. The experience is so similar to a normal dream that I have to think the thought processes that form them are the same: random thoughts and memories thrown together with a recently relevant memory in the brain’s attempt to form them into a cohesive conscious experience. So now, only one question remains…
Why St. Louis?!
