A Note on Dreams

I have been dreaming frequently, in part because my sleep has been lighter than usual and I have stirred regularly from my dreams. Last night, a dear friend of mine was pregnant and the two of us were at dinner with older colleagues or friends, perhaps family. The dining room was grand and eloquent, but all I could do was worry over my friend's health and comfort in the midst of her late pregnancy. I kept pushing for us to call and later to drive to find her doctor, while she happily ignored me because she was determined to enjoy dinner with our friends. I was anxious and could not shake the feeling that she would soon enter labor. The recollection of this dream has lasted longer than most, weighing in strangely on how I now feel.

Other dreams, such as an archaeological hike up a palatial or ceremonial waterfall at high altitude, also hover and bob about my consciousness. I am under the impression--particularly after reading Breaking Open the Head--that the past and future are somehow making themselves known in my dreaming. I have stumbled upon a vibrant and potentially pivotal point in my life, a station that would lend itself to susceptibility to intersection with other joints and twists in my life, lived and yet-to-be. Perhaps this sounds more like hogwash than my friends usually expect from me, but last night I described the present moment as an anchor, pulling me to it from both sides, perhaps from many other less obvious directions. If that is the case, then the role of dreams is just another sort of evidence of the present as a powerful anchor on my life.

Such a reality--one of tides and currents, anchors and islands, of tradewinds and flowing rivers--is not one I expected just a few short months ago. I have had the temporal nature of my life challenged in an uncommon and exciting way. If anything, this new outlook provides a much more contiguous and self-reinforcing structure to my history, to my living than I would have posited on my own. Now, I can expect to circle back and uncover the past as well as the future, that what is ahead is potentially familiar, likely warm with the feelings of amicable hands and the echoing of laughter, happily flavored with deja vu.