Recurring Dreamscapes (Of Mine)

This is a subject I have yet to blog about as I consider it a most personal one. Also, I am unsure if anyone would ever find my dreams of particular interest (maybe a Freudian psychoanalyst perhaps?). But the dreams we have during slumber are something everyone experiences and serve as some sort of common touch point. Why do we dream and why do we dream what we dream in particular? I pose this as more of a rhetorical question if anything else but I certainly do not profess to have all the answers, if any.

I understand the physiological reasons behind why "we" dream. But still, there is an aura of mystery to dreams in the sense that they intrinsically embody an alternate form of reality and consciousness. Have you ever awakened from a dream so moving and profound that it compelled you to undertake a certain action in real life? Or at the least it influenced and colored your moods for a good portion of your subsequent waking hours? I can answer yes in the affirmative to those questions.

Though I don't recall every dream I have on a night to night basis, I can attest to some that have stood out in some manner or another. I have observed a number of dreams that have a definite thread of a recurrence to them. These particular dreams have plagued me for years. And though they may have some slight variation from one another, the end result is always the same. Here are a few examples.

One dream always features me in a unique scenario. I find myself at the absolute end of my final year of high school. For some reason, I had cut class for one particular classroom the whole school year. And now, at the very end of the year, I was required to somehow pull off an act of subterfuge. This "act" requires me to locate the class I had missed all along and surreptitiously blend into it somehow - in the vain and desperate hopes that by doing so successfully, I manage to graduate. This dream never concludes as I always find myself at the proverbial "moment of truth", never progressing to the next act. Analyze that one if you will.

Another recurring dream theme features me returning to the neighborhood I spent the most formative and influential years of my life - Southwest Philly. I have mixed emotions about growing up there. Some experiences I had were very traumatic and yet others I wouldn't trade anything for. Regarding my dreams, I usually find myself alone and wandering down my old street back to the old row home I once lived in.

From there, the variations kick in. Sometimes, I find myself alone in a familiar yet alien setting. Once, I recall encountering my parents there acting as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. I was the same adult self I am in this dream, yet my parents seemed to address me as the small child I was at the time I had lived there. Yet another twist to this dream is finding myself in the midst of an African-American family who resides there, seemingly nonplussed by my appearance. This likely is influenced by the fact that the current residents of that house are of such ethnicity and I don't read very much into it. But it's interesting for certain.

In yet another variation of this theme, I find myself trapped in the basement of my former row home, immersed in darkness (it can get very dark in a basement), sleeping on the cold concrete floor. This could stem from a "camping adventure" my younger brother and I cooked up. I once gamely took a couple chairs and draped a sheet between them, in effect, "camping". Hey, when you live in the concrete jungle, you make do!

But the most personally significant recurring dream I have had over the years stems from a very tragic personal experience I had. In March 1994, I lost my closest and best friend to a virulent ailment that resembled meningitis. He was attending the University of Penn at the time and I had heard that he had taken ill. I had not seen him for a couple of years prior to his death and was looking forward to rekindling our friendship, updating each other on the finer details of our mutual lives.

I grew up with him in Southwest Philadelphia and despite a number of relocations I experienced over the years, we had always managed to maintain some form of contact. At the time of his passing, I was planning on seeing him at the hospital he was at. On the morning I was heading to the hospital he was in, I rudely discovered that he had died just the night before. Assuredly, this incident still haunts me intensely to this very day.

Regarding my recurring dream, I have on numerous occasions found myself wistfully searching for my friend in a number of different environments, never finding him. Last night I found myself in the former Philadelphia row home of his family, who were still very much in grief over his passing. I recall hugging his sister and his mother, reassuring them of how much he meant to me and was absolutely irreplaceable as a friend (of course). The saddest part of this dream was being shown his bedroom, frozen in time as some form of memorial. Other themes of this dream have me in divergent environments, always on a quest for finding my lost friend - with me never, ever succeeding. Needless to say, the sorrow I feel upon awakening is very palpable.

These dreams serve to remind. Who says dreams are a pleasant escape? I wouldn't characterize such as nightmares by any stretch - but they do resonate with a certain sense of loss and frustration. Projections of the psyche? You bet. But when I'm dreaming the dreams, the dreamer is somewhere behind the curtain and these dreams are as real as anything else.