In your dreams
When I was young I had a recurring dream that I was standing in a grassy meadow looking up peacefully at the full moon in the night sky. In my peripheral vision a small plane appeared and suddenly my heart started racing and then the plane collided with the moon and a nuclear holocaust erupted. This was my cold war dream. If I had looked up the dream in a dream book, looking up plane crash as I don’t think dreams carry the plane colliding in moon variety, I would have thought my dream was about losing control.
Yesterday, I noticed at the gym a flyer for a dream interpretation seminar. Learn what your dreams mean, the flyer said. I tend to move in and out of ascribing meaning to dreams but most of the time I think they are mash ups of the bits of information that are coming into the subconscious mind.
I was in my reformer class yesterday evening and was on the Cadillac with my feet in leather straps, suspended from the top bar, holding on to the metal poles. My instructor said, “This reminds me of a dream I had last night.”
I looked at her awkwardly as I was holding on for dear life.
“You weren’t in it,” she said. “I dreamt that Tulane’s campus was under water. Completely submerged.”
These are our new dream mash ups here in New Orleans – we dream we are moving underwater, that our city is underwater, that our pets, our friends, our houses are submerged under water. A dream book may say these dreams of being underwater are about being overwhelmed, but I believe we dream of being underwater because it’s a sign of our times.