I was just there yesterday! Why does everything look so strange? I've never seen that coffee kiosk before -- maybe I took a wrong turn, and I'm in the Science Building? Maybe if I go through this door -- no, it's an art studio....
The clock is ticking. Class should have started by now. I'm late!
Sometimes I rushed out of the house without getting dressed, so I'm running across the campus naked.
Or it's the near end of the semester. Suddenly I realize that I've forgotten to go to the class for the last month! I run out of my office and down the hallway, but I can't find my way...
Or I can't find my lecture notes or powerpoint slides, and I've never taught this subject before....
It's always the same class, "Drugs and Alcohol in American Society," which I've taught several times without incident.
"School anxiety," about being late for class or unprepared for a test, is the third most common type of dream, appearing in 73% of research respondents in a University of Montreal study. The overlapping "late anxiety" is the fifth most common type.
Whatever these "late for class" dreams may signify, they're annoying. Afterwards I have a vague sense of anxiety that lasts through the day.
When I told my friend Gabe about the dreams, he suggested "lucid dreaming," a technique that allows you to orchestrate what goes on in your dreams by rehearsing them in advance.
Before going to sleep, you visualize the dream as you recall it, but make whatever changes you want. Imagine that the hallways are familiar, for instance, or that you're going somewhere pleasant.
Last night I gave it a try. I visualized that was walking across the dark, warm, comfortable campus of a clothing-optional college, on my way to teach Oral Sex 101: Oral Sex for Gay and Bi Men.
1. The physiology and psychology of oral sex.
2. The history of oral sex from the Ancient World to the present.
3. The oral sodomy laws and the limits of jurisprudence.
4. The philology of slang terms.
5. Oral sex in literature, art, and film.
6. The sociological importance of oral sex in contemporary gay communities.
7. Roles and positions.
8. Techniques.
"A Comparative Study of the Erotic Pleasure Received through Oral and Anal Acts."
"How Big is Too Big? Size and Satisfaction for the Oral Bottom."
"Are Big Men More Likely to be Oral Tops?"
"How Many Straight Men Will Agree to Oral Sex with a Gay Man?"
"An Analysis of the Top's Verbal and Non-Verbal Signals During Oral Sex"
"69 as an Act of Political Resistance"
Making up all of that was fun, too, but would it transfer into a more pleasant "late for class" dream?
Eventually I drifted off to sleep.
I had the "late to class" dream again, but my anxiety level didn't go down. I was even more panicked than before, running wildly down the unfamiliar corridors, desperate to get to that classroom.
I really wanted to see those student presentations.
See also: That Bathhouse in West Hollywood; The Ins and Outs of Oral Sex; The Precognitive Dream about the Boy with the Bratwurst
As a child, I had a reoccurring dream that a mad man with a knife was stalking me. I remember he had longish, brown, curly hair and wore horn-rimmed glasses. Each night, he would chase me with his knife, getting closer, and closer, and closer, until he was right behind me. Then I'd wake up, terrified.
ReplyDeleteOne night, I had enough! I was so SICK of this deranged lunatic haunting my dreams! I started dreaming The Dream again. I was at the zoo, and I knew he was following me. Then I see him lurking in some bushes. I dart away, but he follows. I try to lose him, but he sticks with me. I jump onto one of those kiddie train rides and almost get away, but he jumps on the train, too, back near the caboose.
I jump into the next car in front of me, then the next, trying to put some distance between us. But when I look back, the psycho is doing the same. He's getting closer. I can see the sun glinting off his glasses and his knife. He's almost upon me...
But instead of waking up in a cold sweat, I reach into my pocket and pull out an even larger blade --a meat cleaver. The startled mad man drops his knife and jumps off the train. I tear after him, swinging the cleaver and laughing maniacally. When I wake up from the dream, I'm still laughing.
I never had that dream, again, though to this day men with longish, curly, brown hair and horn-rimmed glasses kind of give me the creeps.
I'm pretty sure this was a 'lucid dream.' I've been able to do it again now and then, but not on demand. Fortunately, I don't have nightmares terribly often.
That's a pretty good lucid dream. I'm not usually aware that I'm dreaming, and when I do become aware, I panic and try to wake up right away.
DeleteMadman stalking me AND the geography of my dream is a Lovecraftian mess where "hospital waiting room in Rapid City" leads out to "mall parking lot in Miami" or "La Guardia tarmac" or "Paris market". Buildings might be much larger on the inside than the outside, far more than can be explained by mere illusion.
DeleteTemporal concerns are also irrelevant: Seven years ago, I was in a room full of dead people, some of whom I'd only known in pictures, in a house that was demolished before I met one of them, and that one was the only one my mind decided to cover in dust and mud and rot to make him "look" undead, despite his only dying a few months prior.
Another time I was in an old house that has been sold years prior, in the dead of winter, with a German shepherd I recognized as my old dog staring menacingly, judgingly, at me from outside, covered in frost.
My first lucid dream, though, was as a kid. I don't remember much, other than that the moon was three feet off the ground. Not exactly to scale, but my unconscious mind did recognize that the moon is much more than just a few inches across and is a sphere. Why the moon was orange, I don't know. At the time, I thought it was a vision of the end.
Happy Halloween, kiddies!
But seriously, it's a wonder I get any sleep when I'm being chased through a Lovecraftian urban landscape, having a reunion with the deceased, seeing my dead dog reborn as Fenrir and really have it in for me, and witnessing Armageddon.
I went through the Lucid dream phase also. I wanted to have better control of my sexual dreams (see more good stuff). A book I bought said to tell yourself you are dreaming and you want to watch it on a movie screen and then envision yourself sitting in a comfortable theater seat watching it. Problem was, that the theater chair I imagined was always so plush that the minute I sat down, I fell back to sleep!
ReplyDelete