Still Amazed

Let’s face it, dreams can get very strange

Have any weird dreams lately? I dreamed the other night that coach Pinot Noir was serving as head soccer trainer for Mariah Carey. I have no idea where any of that came from. A coach named after a wine? Mariah Cary playing soccer and being trained by him?

When I woke up I lay there in bed for a few minutes quietly wondering to myself just why on earth I had been dreaming that dream. But dreams can be like that. Often there may be very specific things that they can tell us (or so claim some Freudian psychiatrists), but sometimes no matter just how much you try to tear the dream apart, it finally comes back to nothing more than you just had a weird dream.

All this got me thinking about what other weird dreams may be out there. So, I started asking people what strange dreams they’ve had. It’s an interesting list.

Bizarre dreams

One person I asked told me all about his dream of sailing around the world in a small sailboat by himself and there was never any wind in the sails. Another man offered this as his weirdest dream: he was trudg-ing across the Sahara Desert. He walked over sand dune after sand dune after sand dune. The harsh, dry wind was blowing, the temperature was 125 degrees, he had no water and buzzards were circling overhead.

I worry about both of those guys.

My son, of course, used to dream of Santa Claus and sometimes his dreams got a bit confused. Such as the dream when Santa Claus met up with the Easter Bunny and the two of them went trick-or-treating for Halloween. It took him a long time to explain it and me even longer to understand. He’s older now and no longer dreams of Santa Claus; they lean more to Jaguars, surfboards and tunnels. So much for his dreams.

When I lived in Guadalajara, Mexico I had a neighbor who dreamed of flying. He said he could just fall off a building or cliff and start flying. He said that waking up and realizing he was just dreaming was always the saddest time for him.

Dreaming of food

A childhood friend of mine, when I mentioned that I was writing about dreams, shared some of his strange ones. Apparently, he dreams of food a great deal. I’m not sure why food plays such a large part of his dreamtime, but it does.

Anyway, in one of his dreams he was at a State Banquet. It was a very formal affair, with waiters in tux-edos, and an orchestra playing. He kept trying to get a dance with someone who also wanted to dance with him. But every time they approached each other to dance, there was a small earthquake and everyone fled the room, taking their dinner with them.

Now I suppose that one could say that the dream meant he was afraid of commitment, hated to dance, had problems finding the right partner, or was scared of earthquakes. Or perhaps it was some other much deeper psychological manifestation of something. I don’t know, I’m not a psychologist but if I recall correctly I did recommend he see one.

An aunt of mine said that her strangest dream was one in which she got married to a man she didn’t know and the minister performing the ceremony was her real husband. She wondered if the dream meant that she was subconsciously unhappy with her marriage. But then she wasn’t sure about that because her hus-band was there performing the ceremony. Unless what it all meant was that she was unhappy, wanted to get out of her marriage and into another, better one, but wanted that to be what her husband wanted as well. It was a very confusing conversation to say the least.

Anyway, we dream, we think about dreaming, and we dream again the next night. Some dreams we re-member, most we forget. Dreams are fascinating things, scary or happy or anything in-between. Here’s a question: Would you want to trade dreams with someone?