A Midwinter Day’s Dream

I had this dream once where I was flying. To be honest, I have dreams like this quite often. Not flying like Superman or anything, but more gliding on a cushion of air. I could push a cart and be floating up just as high as the top of the wheels so no one would notice. Or be up in a tree and suddenly be flying over my neighborhood from treetop to the tops of the power lines and back again, all the while taking in everything beneath me like I was in a movie panning over the scene.

Other times I would dream that I was naked. The odd thing was that I’d never realize it until it was too late and I was in public somewhere. And, of course, since it was a dream, I always had a really hot body to cover up with whatever was at hand in dreamland.

Before we moved overseas, I would frequently have dreams where I was in the passenger seat of a car and being told to drive. I’d lean over and try to steer and reach the pedals of an already moving vehicle and wonder why the steering wheel was on the wrong side or why I was on the wrong side. As luck would have it, I was on the right side of the car, just a few years too early.

The oddest dreams are those that bring back names and faces from the past. Boys I haven’t seen since I was 13 and friends I barely knew for fifteen minutes when I knew them fifteen years ago. I always wonder if dreams like that are trying to tell me to look these people up for a reason. Did something happen to them that I should know about? Or maybe something was triggered by hearing a name similar to theirs in passing while I was watching TV that day.

I’m a big one for wondering what dreams really mean. I think it’s because I tend to dream in big shiny Technicolor. Hubby never remembers his dreams but mine are so vivid they often seem real. Are they snippets of what may have been? Or what will someday be? Or, as some stick in the muds think, nothing at all: just pictures behind my closed, blinking eyelids that no one else can see.

Or maybe, just maybe, this whole thing we call life is just one big long dream. Some of it good, some of it long, horrible and rather nightmare-ish. A friend of mine in high school had a theory that we were all just players in a big holodeck of each other’s lives. As soon as we left the scene, we disappeared.

A dream. A scene on Captain Picard’s holodeck. Either way I think it’s time for a nap and maybe perchance to dream.

If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber'd here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,

No more yielding but a dream…