Dreams and Nightmares
Posted: Sunday, July 25, 2010
by Randy Vaughan
Aside from homework assignments and love letters--and though I certainly didn't know it at the time--the labor of writing as an expression of my life started on November 21, 1979. That was five days before my now ex-wife and I officially separated and having accepted the inevitability of it all, I needed a someone to talk to about a life--mine--that had fallen apart. There was no one else at the time except for me. And so I started a journal. That journal is now over thirty-one years old.
No, I'm talking about "dreams" as in hopes and aspirations. Those things are the stuff of entries in my "everyday journal".
I'm talking dreams, and nightmares, the activity that takes place when we are not awake. (I've experienced and accepted as true the veracity of what some call "waking dreams" but such is way beyond the scope of this brief entry.)
I think most people are inclined to dismiss their dreams, and nightmares, as just so much neurological activity and mental masturbation that takes place when they are not, as I've said, awake. My "dream journal" now spans twenty-five years and I'm not allowed the luxury of such simple dismissiveness.
And so, for example, I'm sitting here now at 0342 (that's 3:43 am in military time), having been awakened two hours ago when I screamed myself out of what was, until the screaming started, a rather bland and innocuous dream. I was simply sitting at the computer (in the dream) and working on inserting some links in one of my blogs.
And then I met a familiar "friend" who visits quite often in my "dreams". He's faceless, formless, has never once actually harmed me, yet always manages to leave me in the same shape as a couple of hours ago: Screaming, terrified, and unable--and too frightened--to go back to bed. I've named my friend and though it's not original, Evil seems to work.
You see, Evil has never hurt me, not in my dreams nor in "real life". Oh, I've been shot and stabbed and murdered in my dreams, but it was always by another "life-form," be it human or from some other world or plane of existence. That which can harm us, you see, must have form, must itself be tangible and exist in both time and space. Evil isn't limited by such contrivances, now is it? And yet Evil can not, and does not, harm us in any substantial sense of the word. It merely terrifies us. Perhaps this is why people and employers and governments do not frighten me. They can beat me, kick me, throw me in prison, leave me homeless, murder my family and me. Yes, they and individuals can do "evil things" but they are not Evil. They simply obey Evil and do for Evil what Evil cannot do for itself. Maybe Evil stays angry all the time because it is, at the end of the day, completely powerless and impotent and must, like a baby, depend on others to do its bidding?
Now over the last few months or so, perhaps a year, I had been engaged in a "dream war" with a specific evil entity. Notice the difference. This evil "thing" had all the appearance of a "man" I suppose, but it/he was clearly a "being" that could be touched, seen, heard, at least in the world in which dreams and nightmares take place. Not so with Evil whom I just encountered a couple of hours ago.
And one night after having lost another confrontation to that particular "evil entity," it occurred to me the next day that perhaps I was, well, misjudging this "person". And I resolved that the next time we met I would, instead of either screaming myself awake (my usual reaction) or trying to fight him (always a futile effort and still resulted with me screaming myself awake)--I decided I would simply ask him what he wanted from me, if there was something I had done to him, or something he needed or wanted from me.
And it was, believe it or not, that very night he returned. And I did as I had resolved and he left me peacefully that night and has yet to return.
Evil, however, had been a constant player in my dreams and nightmares for years and has proven to be relentless. Evil is out to get me. I've accepted that.
And so, as I said, I woke myself screaming (and Lisa--poor Lisa, always right there to save me from the boogey-man...the tragedy is she can't same me from myself) and being neither able to return to sleep and having no desire to even try, I do what I always do: I came down here to my computer to make an entry in my "dream journal".
Define irony.
Irony is wanting to write in a dream journal about the unrelenting presence of Evil in your life but being unable to do so because, for the first time since keeping my journals on the computer (twelve years now), the file was corrupted and can't be opened.
Now much like either of my journals, there is no defining "end" to any given entry.
But I will submit this:
People who adhere to the idea of "one size fits all" dream interpretation are wrong. If--a big "if," yes--but if dreams are indeed more than electrical impulses and brain activity, then they are unique and relative only to the person engaged in the activity. In short: What your dreams, and nightmares, mean for you is your business, not mine.
That is not meant to suggest, however, that there does not exist what I'll call some degree of "universal applicability" in our dreams, and nightmares. I can't, won't, and don't apologize for simply refusing to accept that dreams, and nightmares, are just so much mental masturbation. To do that is asking me to deny the reality of my past. In short, there most definitely is a "bigger picture" involved in our existence on this planet.
I just haven't found a fully satisfactory answer. I'm convinced, however, it'll reveal itself in my dreams, and nightmares. They are, after all, far more "real" (to me) and have more true meaning (to me) than what we mean when we say the "real world".
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Top-level comments on this article: (2 total)I think dreams are very important and tell us a lot about what we're wrestling with at a core level. And I agree that the interpretation depends on the individual.Hey, Jennifer...I write mine (as I did just a few hours ago after another "wtf" kind of dream) and then try to find some meaning but usually, it's just not there. Some, however...wow! And Lisa, my wife, in thirty years has told me exactly one dream. She swears she doesn't dream. She also enjoys that wonderful, peaceful, undisturbed sleep. In fact, she's sleeping now. I think I'll go throw ice water on her because it's just not fair! :)
Great article Randy- I agree that there is auniversal applicability to all our dreams- and that is what we call"evil," which takes the individual forms and designs of who we are. That's why I stated in my article that we ourselves are the only ones who can truly and fully interpret our own dreams.- A 5 star write- up! Always- EllaThanks, Ella...I'm way behind on my reading so I'm getting there. From the time I was only, oh, 6 or 7 years old until just a few years I had the same recurring nightmare. And then in classic "Luke Skywalker kills Darth Vader only to see that he has killed himself," I confronted that "evil" and it WAS me and I've not had the dream since....
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