wacky dreams all around

To start this post, I want to share a poem that was published last October in the New Yorker:

Dream with Flowers and Bowl of Fruit

Too many of my dreams these days are boring.
I expect to drop into the pillow
and see the kind of action night is for --
a psychic workout, romance, close escapes:
Not much gets accomplished in a still-life;

nobody looks at asters as a way
to get a taste of life. I want to happen,
not to slightly rearrange my day
nightly in a recurring tablescape.
Dreams! However beautiful the apples,

fruit is low on drama, and I miss
passion, flying, falling, being chased,
crashing, panic -- trauma -- and I miss,
small and quick, a movement in the grapes,
and the shiver of a petal in the vase.

--Deborah Warren

Awesome poem, don't you think? Such an interesting way to express a wish for nighttime dreams which are more than just a rearranged still life of daytime routines. I especially love the line "However beautiful the apples,/fruit is low on drama."

More often than not, my dreams are wacky and drama-filled, anything but rearranged fruit on a quiet table. Some of them have been so vivid, I still remember them quite clearly, like the bizarre one I had when I was about 14.

Before I dive into the dream itself, a quick geography lesson is in order. The house I grew up in was a split entry, with the main living area upstairs, and the laundry room and a large playroom/family room downstairs. The latter was located to the right of the bottom of the staircase, just beyond the under-the-stairs storage, and was entered by way of a dark brown, wooden door.

And now the dream:

I was calmly walking down the upper flight of stairs. Everything was present day and in technicolor. But as soon as I reached the landing by the front door, my world turned black and white, I was in an enormous hurry, and I'd been transported back to the 1940s. I rushed down the second flight of stairs, turned to the right to face a door no longer solid brown, but which now had a window on the upper half. The glass was of that thick, pieced together sort that is all but impossible to see clearly through, and there was black lettering, displayed in an arch, announcing what sort of room I was about to enter. I don't know what the words actually said, but apparently it was some sort of open newsroom.

I flung the door open and yelled, "Stop the presses! I've just discovered a new word!" Everyone gave me their full attention and then suddenly the screen of my dream when black and a twirling newspaper spun into focus, highlighting the fabulous new word I'd just created. I don't remember what the new word was, or what it meant, but I can tell you that it called for a lovely assortment of little-used letters like "x," "z," and "q." Also, it was beautiful, not only for its useful meaning, but for the actual shape the letters made joined together in this particular order.

My creation of this word helped me to quickly achieve world fame. The next thing in my dream that I remember is an image of me, dressed in fabulous post-war garb, including a large hat worn tilted to one side, riding in the back of a classic convertible car through a New York City ticker-tape parade held in my honor. I somehow was able to produce the most exquisite wave as I acknowledged my adoring public. It was awesome.

And that, my friends, is a classic example the wacky dreams, which are about as far removed from a "still life" as I think you can get, that I am wont to often have. What are some of your wacky dreams?