Wednesday, July 02, 2008

Tornadic Dream

Beautiful pictures like this belie the destructiveness and horror of tornadoes.

I dreamed last night that I was working in a high-rise office again. Everyone was in a panic because a tornado was visible from one of the windows. We were looking for a place of refuge inside the building. I found a white-painted two-panel wooden door. Ah, the staircase! I thought it would be safe. But as I looked down to the next wooden landing, I realized that the stairs were lit by windows. The one at the landing had peeling white paint and was tilted open. I decided to go down the stairs, thinking that the ground floor would be at least somewhat safer than the upper floors.

Downstairs, everyone was pouring out of the office building into a candy store across the street. The candy store was an old one-storey structure with canopies and fruit stalls in front of it. As we crossed the dirt street (It hadn’t even started to rain yet!), I asked someone why we were all running into the candy store. “It has a basement,” he yelled. Then he shoved his hat down tighter on his head and ran.

“It’s dropping!” someone nearby yelled.

I turned and got my first good look at the “high rise.” It covered about half a block and stood three stories tall. It was cased in stone and a short, square minaret graced each corner—they looked more like battlements, but minaret is what I remember thinking of them as. Centered between the two visible minarets and about a quarter mile beyond the building, a tornado snaked down from a slate cloud. I woke up then. My heart was beating fast, but it wasn’t racing like it has been after several less eventful dreams lately. I remember thinking that at least I had a reason for an elevated heart rate.

Another odd thing about this dream is that the perspective was different. I was shorter in the dream than I am in this life. Could it be a memory of a past life? If so, it wouldn’t be the first such for me. Or is it more likely to stem from reading a book in which the main character remembers glimpses of past lives? There’s no way to tell.

I have had a number of dreams lately (undocumented here) that were no more threatening than the one about Rose breathing. I would awaken from these dreams with all of the symptoms on an anxiety attack—that is, all the symptoms except for anxiety. As an experiment, I stopped drinking diet soda for a few days, and they seemed to abate. Too much caffeine?

4 comments:

Suna Kendall said...

Well, you have stuff to be anxious about. But are handling it well while awake. This stuff shows up in dreams.

Lee said...

According to the dreams, I’m more worried about the mundane stuff than the big stuff. But I guess that’s typical of me. I can’t control the some of the big stuff, so I don’t worry about it that much.

Stephanie said...

All very good psychology and dream interpretation stuff but I vote to stay off the diet soda! Either that, or your dream was trying to get you to the candy store. (In that case, check and see if the boys are playing tape recordings in your room at night.)

Lee said...

Well, the boys have had me listen to a bunch of their MP3s lately. Hmmmm… But you’re probably right about the diet soda.

Sigh. I loves me a rum and cola in the evening. But if they’re going to affect my sleep like that, I’ll just have to have them in the mornings instead.

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