Dream On

Greta over at The Memory Burns mentions waking up recently while apparently (and rather disconcertingly) in the middle of having a conversation with a couple of characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I love hearing things like this, because it makes me feel just a tiny bit more normal.

I mean, at one point or another, I've had dreams featuring: various Blake's 7 characters, Harvey from Farscape (yes, just Harvey!), Tyr Anasazi from Andromeda, the fourth, sixth and seventh Doctors, and, now that I think of it, both the Master and the Cybermen (though not at the same time). Oh, and some members of the original Star Trek crew at some point, but I'm pretty hazy on which ones, because I only very vaguely remember that one. I seem to recall that, for some unfathomable reason, it had characters from The Flintstones in it, too, which has got to make for one of the world's weirdest crossover scenarios.

Actually, the dream featuring Tyr was really interesting. (And, no, not for the reasons you might expect a dream involving the stultifyingly hunky Tyr to be interesting, alas!) I remember getting some way into it and suddenly thinking, "Hey, wait a minute! That was totally out of character for Tyr! And, come to think of it, this, that and the other thing don't match up with the universe he comes from, either. Oh, wait, OK, this must have actually been that, and I can make the other detail fit if I assume this other thing..." At which point, satisfied that the characterization and the TV-show continuity worked (despite the fact that they really didn't), I happily continued on with the dream. Yes, that's right, I actually engaged in the possibly-never-before-documented practice of dream-retconning!

This is probably the closest to a lucid dream I've ever actually come. Well, except maybe for the time I was having a horrible, depressing dream about waiting to die from the fallout after a nuclear war and finally managed to tell myself "This is only a dream! I must wake up!" Usually when that happens (as it has on a few occasions), I just wake up, but this time I instead only dreamed that I'd woken up, and found myself in a safe, happy place surrounded by my family. It was only after that that I woke up for real.

On a similar note, I did once, when I was a teenager, dream that I came home from school, sat down and fell asleep in the living room. I then had a long, involved dream-within-a-dream -- actually, come to think of it, it was the one involving the fourth Doctor -- only to "wake up" afterwards back in the first dream (where I suddenly realized that I'd fallen asleep in the wrong house!). Weird, huh?

Of course, who knows what other kinds of bizarre things I've dreamed about that I don't even remember. The vast majority of the time, even when I wake up thinking "Wow, that was interesting. I'll have to remember that one!", it still fades completely from my mind after a few minutes.

I do have some recurring dreams that stick in my mind, though. Like the one where my teeth are falling out. That one is so frequent and so vivid that sometimes during my waking hours I'm a little surprised to realize that all my teeth are still there, or to remember that, no, I haven't actually lost a tooth since my last adult molars came in sometime in my teens. Usually, that dream is perfectly benign. Indeed, most of the time it turns out that the reason my teeth are falling out is because there are new teeth growing up underneath them, just like when I was a kid. Lately, though, they've gotten more unpleasant. A few times I've gone to pull the tooth out and somehow managed to shatter it into pieces, leaving me a socket full of nasty, jagged tooth-pieces. But that's not nearly as bad as when it comes out intact, but trailing this long silvery wire. In the dream, it doesn't hurt, because you don't really feel pain in dreams, but I always know it's a nerve, and I know that if I touch it or cut it (which I'm going to have to do), it'll hurt like hell. But it's not the anticipation of pain that's really disturbing, so much as the sight of two feet of nerve coming out of this disembodied tooth and disappearing into my jaw. Or the fact that the more I pull on it, the more it keeps coming out...

The other major recurring dream I have is actually a series of dreams consisting of variations on the theme of falling to my death. Usually I'm going over a cliff or mountainside in a car, which is actually something of a waking phobia of mine. Occasionally I'm in a crashing plane, which is a little more odd, becuase I'm not really afraid of flying at all. Once in while it'll instead involve somie sort of killer elevator that completely defies the laws of physics (and, no, I'm not afraid of elevators, either). Except in the case of the elevators (where I think I mostly remember simply feeling complete and utter terror), those dreams usually focus on me knowing for an absolute, in-the-process-of-happening fact that I am going to die, and desperately trying to think of some appropriate final thoughts to, um, think. I'm sure that says something terribly profound about the human psyche, or possibly just about me, but I'm not 100% sure I honestly want to know what it is.

Other than that, I don't seem to be particularly prone to anything severe enough to be worthy of the name "nightmare." I have had the usual kinds of anxiety dreams. You know, the one where you have to take a final for a class you forgot you were signed up for and haven't attended all semester, or the naked-in-public one. I don't think I've had either of those in quite a while, though. (Oh, great, now I've probably jinxed myself, and tonight I'll have to take a test naked while falling off a cliff or something...)