MindsBase

I had a dream last night that one of my friends’ family was coming to visit me (on a tropical island where I lived) when I got a phone call saying that they had all been killed in a plane crash.

In the dream, I sunk to my knees and began to sob. Then I shook myself awake, out of the dream, but I still felt racked with emotion and guilt for inviting her to visit me on my island.

Couldn’t shake the feeling all morning. Don’t you hate that?

But its interesting, isn’t it, what things come out of our subconscious minds and how they affect our lives. I wonder what worries, or expectations, or preconditions we carry around with us that impair our ability to be happy and successful? If my worries are leaking into a dream, they must be somewhere buried inside me. And they probably have nothing to do with worries about plane crashes or this particular friend. Dreams — mine, at least — are abstract at least, and metaphorical at most…

Or maybe I’m just playing out story ideas while off-the-clock.

Here’s an LA Times post about the significance of dreams >>

There are things I miss.

I miss Ultima III, the one that came on 5 1/4″ floppies. The one where you were just a tiny figure moving about the landscape, talking in the towns and fighting in the woods. I loved saying “join me” to people and delighted when they said they would join my motley crew. I liked it better than Ultima IV because you could travel all night without the darkness swallowing you. I never knew what was lurking in that darkness.

Way back, I remember being frightened of the dark greenish pages and pale green pants with nobody inside them. My imagination created a horror movie-worthy villain out of those pants. I was most alarmed when they began to cry. It only made them more horrible when they shook like that.

I even miss Hunt the Wumpus, a text-only game played on the Wang computer that sat on our dryer in the laundry room. I imagined the Wumpus — big, hairy, many-legged, dripping with yuck, lurking in the semi-darkness of one of the rooms as I played Russian roulette with the doors.

What I’m saying is, I miss imagination, even in its darkest form. But also in its most wondrous! Now, everything is visual, three-dimensional, surround-sound, neon-sign. We’ve lost the subtle shades of emotion that imagination creates.

So, I decided to make my own world for my imagination to play in. It is made up of nothing but the twenty-six western letters and ten numbers. Eventually there may be a few line drawings and a glossy cover illustration, but it’s mainly just a world in my mind.

I used to have more vivid dreams. Perhaps I’m just too tired now to have many of them. Or too grown-up. I actually miss the terror that jerked me from the dream where I’m running from “bad guys” down my dark neighborhood streets. I’m running in slow-motion, of course, screaming at my legs to MOVE, C’MON MOVE!

So I knew that it would be endlessly fun to have my imaginary playground to be a dream. A shared dream.