i have been having an odd relationship of late with sleep, and i do not mean the normal (for me, that is) sense in which it seems to elude me most days. to the contrary, i have spent more time asleep than awake over the past few days, and that in itself is already strange.
the most bizarre part of the experience, however, is the intensely-vivid dreams i have been experiencing in said state. like last night, for example.
i found myself, near the end of that dream, laying on the roof of a building. it was a broad, mostly-flat surface, and i kept going back and forth between imagining the terrace garden that could be created in that space... and wondering what the heck i was doing up there in the first place.
that is when vertigo got a hold of me, and i could not convince a single muscle to move enough to try to find a door or a set of stairs that would lead me down from there. i finally managed to crawl a few feet. not so much that i was at the edge of the roof, but just far enough that i could get a glimpse of the landscape beyond the building.
what i saw was equal parts breathtaking and frightening.
i was high up enough to be well above the top of the surrounding trees. but they were not any trees i had expected to find. the whole world, as far as the eye could see, was surrounded by a sprawling expanse of lush green coconut trees, like something out of a tropical fantasy.
i could also make out a field of vegetables growing a short distance from the building, and i instantly recognized the large leaves of dasheen and other plants that one or the other of my grandmothers wold have grown in their gardens back in the day.
it was familiar... but frightening all the same.
i was definitely no longer in Montreal, or even back in Brooklyn. where was i... and how did i manage to find myself in such an awkward position?
this is when i heard the faint sound of a woman's voice coming from somewhere near the building. she was welcoming someone, and explaining that the resort they were standing in was once a working estate that belonged to her family. she went on to note that all the food they would be eating during their stay had been sourced from the property, and i got a sudden mental image of a figure walking through the picturesque field, filling a basket with items that would later become a colorful meal.
i realized at this point that all i had to do was to make enough noise for them to know that i was up there. but doing so would have meant crawling closer to the edge of the building, or even just opening my mouth to scream. however, the panic was so great at this point, that i was struggling to even breathe.
so i just laid there... paralyzed by fear.
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i awoke a short while later to find myself alone in the bed at almost one in the morning, still surrounded by that feeling of dread. i wanted to get out of the bed just long enough to walk to the studio next door where my favorite animator was working late into the night, or to even tap on the wall just loud enough to let him know that i was awake. but i could not shake that horrible feeling.
so i just laid there for the longest time... still paralyzed by fear.
this is utterly fascinating. I think we tend to discount dreams as having no value, but now and then one like this surfaces, and it needs to be paid some attention.
ReplyDeletetalk to your mother. Find out as much as you can about where your family originated, I'm thinking you have tapped into some kind of past memory, not necessarily your own--it might also be a precog dream, those are vivid as hell and sometimes happen, if you go that way ("oh honey, let's go to Belize for a vacation"), and you find yourself in that setting. And if you don't, you don't.
Been there, more than once. I have had dreams that three or four months later I find myself in the middle of--not the whole thing, sometimes just a glimpse, a walk down a street I'd never seen, or a doorway that opens.
I'm still looking for the man called Kewaydin. =)
my family is from the Caribbean, so i have definitely spent lots of time in tropical surroundings. but i get the sense in that dream that i was not in any place i had ever seen before. it was the simultaneous familiarity and absolute alien nature of the setting that i still find so unnerving. then there is the vertigo bit.
Deletei have vertigo in my waking life, but never anything this extreme. i have had dreams in the past where i am flying or some other such thing that had me above the ground, and i never experienced vertigo in those situations. but this time it was there, and so very intense.
i don't want to think too much about what any of it ultimately means. that never ends well in my experience.
don't blame you. My precog dreams are usually about future events, not deeply darkly things, and sometimes so on the money as to be scary. My thought was, you might find yourself in that place someday, as Mork would say, "Deja Vu, again"...
ReplyDeleteoh, i get that all the time. nothing big and scary as you say, but just so damn unnerving when it happens, that you start questioning reality.
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