Innermost Thought

I realize that this blog has become sort of a "One-Note Nancy" since the primaries began. I'm just so excited about the democratic process that I can't help but think about it alot...virtually all of the time. Is this what it's like when guys say they think about sex every 10 seconds?

In an effort to not have four posts in a row about politics I thought I'd tell you about a few dreams I had about six months ago. Odd dreams are not foreign to me by any stretch. I remember some dreams I had in Jr. High School. Some become the source material for future stories and plays. Others are premonitions- I had a dream about my first real boyfriend weeks before I actually dated him. This was odd because a good friend of mine had a huge crush on him at the time whereas I really didn't. I remember thinking about this oddity - that I would dream about him as a romantic interest. Then we met a few weeks later and it didn't seem so odd at all.

While I am used to having...exquisite and vivid dreams, I'm consistently bemused by their contents. My subconscious is one crazy mofo: eclectic, creative and strangely brilliant but a little crazy none the less. Many mornings I wake up and my first thought is, "How the hell did she (my subconscious) come up with that one?"

These two dreams happened on the same night which may be why I remember them so vividly. Both dreams were about a sibling.

Horrifying

The first, more realistically horrific, dream was about my sister. She was a cop -in the uniform and everything. Her hair was shoulder length and down and well-coiffed. I remember thinking how silly it was for her hair to look so good since it would likely get mussed easily while performing her daily duties as a law enforcement officer. While I don't remember the particulars of the events that transpired beforehand I remember she had gotten shot. She and I were in the back of a police car and she was losing blood and it was terrifying. The inevitability of her death in the dream was very real and all-powerful.

My waking self, which is a pro when it comes to dealing with strange dreams horrific or otherwise, is practical enough to realize that just because one dreams of the death of a person it doesn't mean that person is going to die. It's like the death card in a tarot deck. It's meaning is not always literal. Just to be certain I made sure to perform my ritual whenever I have dreams like these: to call members of my family and advise them to be extra aware. Even though my waking self was certain my sister wasn't going to get shot it was just as certain that something disastrous was going to happen to someone.

About a week later I was with a good friend of mine who told me about a mutual friend who went on an adventure trip with buddies. One of his buddies died during that trip in an accident. They all went out one morning to go rafting and by afternoon, one of them was dead. It immediately clicked with me that my dream was about my friend's situation rather than my own. It may be ignominious to admit but I felt a sense of relief upon hearing the sad circumstance of our mutual friend's trip. It was the other piece to the puzzle of that dream. While I do truly feel for those who knew the guy who died, my circle of love and influence remains in tact. And that dream was hanging over me. The reason for having dreamt it was revealed. I and my loved ones remain unscathed.

Weird

The other dream I had that night was about my brother. In this dream he was a carrot on a plate of crudites. It was a heart-wrenching reality that my brother was a carrot. I wasn't sure what magic transpired to turn him into a root vegetable but I was suspicious that I inadvertantly had something to do with it. Mostly I was sad that my brother was a carrot.

I started feeding my brother other carrots thinking the nutrients would help turn him back into a real boy. This is where that "crazy subconscious" assertion comes in. Imagine feeding a carrot that you love fibers of another carrot and looking for signs of limbs or facial features growing, emerging from it's carrot-self. At one point I suggested (through my heartfelt tears) that Danny try to make teeth out of part of his carrot-self so that it might be easier to eat the other carrots. I was gratified when I saw little carrot-consistency teeth form at one end of my brother. I thought we were making progress. But I must have turned my head for a minute because the next thing I remember is looking at the plate of carrots and my brother was nowhere on it. I was horrified to wonder if maybe someone (maybe me!?) ate him by accident.

I was alot less worried about the real-world implications of the Carrot Danny dream upon waking. While I don't think the Jfer Cop dream was a prognosticating dream, it does look like it occurred at around the same time as the real life events of the rafting trip occurred. I suppose it was more a "commiserating" dream than anything; a psychic reach out of sorts.

The carrot dream did not feel prescient at all or a signifier of real-life events. This is a good thing because I think it would be supremely frustrating to have prescient or commiserating dreams all of the time and not be able to effectively interpret them until after the fact. Fortunately the dream was bizarre enough that I could wake from it feeling mostly bemused and entertained. Still you can bet that I gave every carrot I ate for the next few weeks more than a passing glance to look for any resemblance.