I used to dream long, vivid dreams that I remembered in detail. Sometimes, I would awake and write them down and they would come out like saga poems.
In my teens and twenties, I dreamed stories, like being in a bookshop with my mother who was telling me how to spend my book-buying dollars, me getting frustrated and leaving, then walking back up the street to find my mother standing outside the bookshop in an animal print bikini, in the waves that crashed out of the bookstore (where presumably the ocean was), trying to avoid the shark that was swimming in the surf while getting as close a look at it as possible.
At some point, my dream memory began to fade and it seemed my dreams had become less interesting, shorter, hardly worth remembering. And then, about ten years ago, I stopped remembering my dreams altogether. It was disappointing.
Recently, I had a few long, detailed dreams, like the ones many years ago. In one of them I was in the right place at the right time to catch a baby as it popped out of a friend's vagina. It was slippery, like a greased pig, and I kept almost dropping it as I washed it off and finally managed to deliver it to its mother's stomach. Everything was OK in the end. Whew!
Another dream was long and detailed, like the old sagas, rich with emotion and images. It left me feeling vulnerable and so alive, in that messy, real way.
I couldn't get it out of my head and for a few days I told it over and over, to different people. A friend said it sounded like a great short film. Finally, I wrote it down and couldn't stop until it was done. I embellished it in the writing, just a little, because now the narrative had grabbed me and I did begin to see it as a story, like I used to, maybe even a film. The process of writing it took away the compulsion to tell it. The narrative passed through me, and like a fine filter, it dragged out of me strong emotions, some pleasant, others not so much.
After talking with close friends and confidants, I take this dream as a significant signpost along the amazing personal journey I've been on for the past couple of years. I like the direction it says I'm pointed in.
I'll post it here in time. The photograph in this entry is of my bedroom, where I dreamed this most tender dream.
