Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Extreme Dreams

by Drew Martin
Extreme dreaming is one of my favorite pastimes. I often have vivid and engaging dreams. I am not sure why this is. Perhaps I eat too late, or maybe it is a southpaw thing.

My dream last night was particularly memorable because it covered several years. It started at my train station: I hopped on a late afternoon train to go into the city, but it made an impossible U-turn under the tracks and headed an hour north to the corner of my state. The other passengers (who knew where the train was going) and I were dropped off at a colonial crafts village, where I met a friend whose mother use to loom fabrics. We looked at how the older clothing was made, and walked around the village. As night approached, I started to head back for the train but could not find my friend, nor could I find a clear path in the woods. I got stuck in the village for four years and spent the entirety of the dream trying to leave but every exit plan dead-ended.

The landscape and architecture of the dream was maze-like. Stairwells, for example, split into multiple descents that either stopped at a wall or turned upwards again. Paths going downhill towards the river, ended at the base of a mountain, and the people were blissfully unaware of their limited territory.

Somehow I worked my way out of the dream labyrinth and got to the entrance gate of the region in which I had been bound. This coincided with my nearing the end of the dream. As I left the place, I looked back at the entrance gate, and then, before I could turn to look ahead, I awoke, not knowing if I was returning to the world as I knew it or if it had been destroyed during my time away from it. I had suspected that the boundaries were established to protect the inner realm with its idyllic conditions from perhaps a harsher reality or even an obliteration of the outside world.