Tuesday, October 29, 2013

the swooping flying falling dream

Everyone has a form of this dream, I think.  The swooping/flying/falling nightmare.
I had it last night.
At the beginning of the dream, I was at my mom's house looking outside at her garden. The garden was full of frogs, all kinds of frogs, sitting on leaves and on decorations and on the ground.  I went outside because one of the frogs was very appealing to me, and this frog came over to me and clearly wanted to be my pet.  I took it inside.  I also had some kind of pet lizard inside.
It was time for me to go to the Astrological Society of Connecticut's New Age Fair, where IRL I am a vendor every quarter, selling my books on the Mayan-Aztec calendar and artwork along with my artist Mike.  For whatever reason, I brought the new frog and the lizard and some other small creatures.  They were in a shallow round container covered with a black cloth.
The fair was held in a dream building.  Some lady kept putting her things onto my vendor table, worse yet, putting them on top of my pets, and I was very upset that the frog and lizard and other critters would be injured or killed.
The day before the fair, Leonard Cohen, the singer, had died.  (As I am writing this, he is very much alive, although Lou Reed just died, who is not in any way the same person.)  Apparently the way to commemorate this singer's death is to have line dancing at a New Age fair.  I am not into line dancing.  I was in the line, though, ready to do my duty, when people started to notice that there were cavities in the walls and everyone went into those cavities, because apparently acting like a rat is also a good way to commemorate the death of an awesome singer.
Inside the walls were a series of curved tunnels, stairs, spirals, and ladders. It was like a giant fun house.  Everything was around a blind corner.  You'd be spiraling up and next thing you'd turn a corner and be sliding down.  I was following two young girls.  We went up and then around a corner was a short ladder going down.  We climbed down the ladder and at the bottom was the mouth of a closed slide, like a water slide. They fit into it easily and were on their way but I was too fat.  I had no choice but to climb back up the ladder. But as I climbed it, it got longer and longer, and went further and further away from the wall.  Finally I was at the top of an immensely tall ladder, like an Indian monk doing a rope trick, and I was outside the building.  The ladder was free-standing, but wobbling.  I had a bit of lucid dreaming then--oh shit here it comes--and then the ladder started to lean toward the building.  I could see that I had to aim myself at a very small window.  I was swooping, I was flying, it was awful.
And I woke up.
I've also had varieties of this dream where I'm on a trampoline, or the high dive at a pool, and every jump I go higher and higher and get more and more scared but I have such momentum I can't stop. The going up is bad, the short hover at the top is terrible, and the falling, falling, falling in a great arc is the worse.
My husband was watching one of the Jackass movies once.  They were doing this stunt where they bounced people off a huge air pillow into a lake.  They put a camera on one person so the viewer could experience it. 
And although I have never swooped or flown (except in a jet) or fallen from a great height, the view from that camera was EXACTLY like my dreams.  To the point where I could not watch the movie until that segment was over.
According to the online Dream Dictionary, a falling dream means you feel like your life is out of control.  Something horrible happened to me last night, something beyond my control, something that I see as a betrayal, so that doesn't surprise me.  Their information on frogs and ladders was less than helpful, nothing on lizards, new age fairs, swooping, or deep-voiced singers.
(image source)