The Dream

I just woke up from a very strange and powerful dream. It's hard really to describe where it took place, as dreams aren't always very concrete, but for the most part it took place in a dream-realized version of my dorm room - it was a little bit bigger, and my bed was the other way against the wall and quite bigger, with my desk and computer nowhere to be found. The whole of the interesting part I guess took place there in my room, because it was centered around the dreams I was having (inside the dream!). I can't remember all of the first part, much to my dismay, but it involved me dreaming about me reading a book. I was having reoccuring dreams about reading this book. It was a story about a very kind and gentle man, but rather silent (think Atticus Finch, but quieter).

The reoccuring dreams had me reading more and more about the life of this man in the "present" of the book. The first reoccuring dreams I don't remember too well (maybe this was an element of the dream - it was modeling the realistic nature that I usually forget the earliest dreams I have in a night while sleeping), but they involved details about how the man lived day to day. And the awesome thing about this book was that it was laid out in such a unique way - it starts describing the life of the man in more and more detail as you went on, and you found out more and more practical and normal things about him that you might find in the beginning of any other book. For example, you didn't learn until chapter 6 or 7 that he had a daughter, but the beginning chapters had been describing his present life continuously.

This next part is the clearest, and is so due to the nature of how it was presented in the dream. In the dream, I was awoken by three people knocking on the door/coming in, understood by me in the dream as: the girl I love, two other friends, and my roommate was also in the room (who I could easily recognize outside of this dream, it did look like him!). And so I started to tell them that I was reading a book, except I was sure I was reading it in my dreams! These dreams about reading the book were *extremely* important to me, and I wanted to express that to the people there by telling them all about it. So they came and sat on the bed as I began to explain.

When I described how I knew I was reading the books in the dream, I got an image that dream-me imagined as him sitting on a floor next to a bed (it looked like an emptier version of dream-dorm room), and flipping through the pages of the book. (Remember chapters 6 and 7 from earlier? Yeah, this is where I saw the numbers of the chapters on the pages) I explained the way the book had been set up, learning more about the man as the book went on in such a strange way. Then I explained the episode to them from chapters 6 and 7.

The beginning of the scene is rather fuzzy and unclear, but it involves the man in his bedroom, whereupon his daughter (a few years old) runs in with some kind of injury on her arm (something like a cut or scratch, but it had a little bit of blood that needed to be cleaned up). The man opens a box and pulls out a white (silky maybe?) piece of cloth and wipes of the blood on her arm. The daughter pulls back her arm quickly as if it hurt, and this somehow leads into an explanation of where the cloth comes from (I imagine it would have gone something like the girl asked what the cloth was, or why it hurt). The explanation is rather a weird one and why he used it is not perfectly clear, but no matter.

The scene quickly changes to the man on his wedding day (we find out he had a wife!), and he's involved in a rather peculiar ceremony. He pours wine into a rather strange devise - think of a bronze-ish metal tray with only two circular depressions, and now put that on a small stand with two legs. Once the two depressions are filled with the wine, he turns it over onto something (this part is really fuzzy and wasn't clear in the first place), maybe a book (the Bible?) or some kind of pendant on a book. At best I can say that this is a symbolic act of unity (two goes to one?), to even more clearly show that the man was indeed married. The man then uses the silky white cloth to clean up the alcohol.

We then flash back to the present, with him washing the cloth. It's pretty clear it has not been washed until now - as a lot of color comes out of it in the sink. This part is really hard to understand, as dream me gave it INCREDIBLE significance, and dream me knows what's up, so let's look at it.

Basically, the convoluted reason that the man used the cloth to clean his daughter's cut is because it had alcohol in it (put alcohol on your wounds for sterilization, eh?). This is pretty ridiculous, as it's obviously been a long time since the wedding and that's just not feasible anyways. Even dream me understands this, and dream me comes to the conclusion that using the cloth like this is just a literary device of the author to segway into the wedding scene to show us this man was married. Pretty cool dream literary device, eh? There is also some ambiguity here for me, because in the dream, his daughter did ask what a video cassette is (I think she meant tape, but being a child didn't know the right word for it), and this seemed to have the same segway potential to talking about the wedding.

This part seems to make some logical sense. I think first the cloth segwayed to the symbolic scene of the wedding, then we come back to the present to the man washing the cloth, and then we have the daughter ask what a video cassette it. This is probably due to the fact that the symbolic wedding scene is the man explaining where the cloth comes from to his daughter (because in this dream, whenever an explanation happens we segway into a scene of the actual event). Somewhere in this explanation, he tells his daughter that the wedding was taped on video, with a tape or something. She then either goes and finds it and asks what it does, or simply asks when he tells her that the tape exists. Briefly then there is a very weird image on a TV screen about to play the tape.

But right then, we are drawn back to dream me reading the book on the floor in his dream. I get a clear view of the pages again, and what I'm reading makes sense (it doesn't make sense to me now, but in the dream it did), until a certain point. Somewhere into chapter 7, the text says something like: "a recap of chapter 6 and things that were left out or unexplained." Then the text starts making no sense to dream me. Then the scene is drawn back from his dream scene of reading the book on the floor to being back in the bed explaining it to the people there. Dream me then says that the text started making no sense because he was dreaming it (Ha!), and dreams have a funny way of making books and things unreadable at random points.

He seemed eager to explain the meaningfulness of this man and this book to his friends, and they listened seemingly intently up until that point in the story. But once dream me tried to explain the significance and meaning of the man in the book (how he related to his current situation with this girl he loved), one of the other friends started talking about something, and dream me got really upset and told them to leave. It is important here to note that (at seemingly random times? I can't explain the chronology of this part) he would tell this girl he loved strange things seemingly to compliment her and hint at some meaning in the story (he uses an expression (legendary maybe?) to describe something about her. He tells her that it had incredibly signicance in his dream story, and he uses this term specifically three times, each time the phrase is a little differently modified. I don't really know what this means, except that he was hinting at his love and the similarness of his situation to the man in the story. Perhaps this is why the story was so important and the man so dear to him. There was a sense of desperation almost in dream me, and a kind of hopeless shame.

This then segwayed into another dream where they went to some man's house (that had something to do with the movie Spanglish, the friends even said so in the dream), but this part is unclear and I was woken up by my alarm before it could go very far. I did not expect the explanation of the dream to be this long (I woke up and started to think about it right away to remember it), but I guess a lot did happen in a seemingly short amount of time.

I wish I had this book. I don't think I'd ever be able to write it because the dream imagery is strange and wouldn't make too much sense to write something that convoluted. Whatever it is, it had a lot of significance to dream me, which probably says something about me. I never got to the end of the story in the reoccuring dreams, and I doubt I'll ever have this dream again, so I might never get a different angle on it. The man from the story had a quiet sadness about him, but he was so gentle and almost dutiful. I'm not sure exactly what to make of it (maybe I am, but I don't think I'll say it at any rate). Maybe it'll mean something to you.