The Tedium of Dreams

[tealin]

I am no stranger to the anxiety dream. Usually these start a month or two before I'm due to travel somewhere, and involve losing an important item or not getting to the airport on time. I've been having a certain amount of real-life travel anxiety lately, around getting (or not?) a work visa for my usual teaching gig in Denmark. I don't know if this is too advanced for my lizard brain to process, or if it just doesn't know how to translate vague bureaucratic uncertainty into something to panic over, but somehow the usual airport anxiety has been translated into ... bus anxiety. Falling asleep and missing my stop. Missing my stop, getting off at the next one and crossing the street to catch the bus back the other way, but there are no buses going the other way. Not realising how close my stop is and having to scramble to gather up more stuff than I could possibly have carried aboard, and not having sufficient bag or arm capacity for it all. Usually this takes place in Vancouver, I suppose because that's where I took the most buses.

Last night, the usual bus problems were compounded by a trip back to my old houseshare in Cambridge, where I was supposedly still paying rent for my room even though I didn't live there, and discovered a great pile of mail for me on the counter – mostly junk, but a few returned envelopes and a some other things of interest. I had to sort through it while Troublesome Housemate hovered awkwardly behind me, and the sound of very young and raucous undergrads bounced around the house. And then it was back on the bus for another misadventure.

What is it like to have fun fantasy dreams that throw crazy stuff at you, instead of the most tedious or uncomfortable aspects of waking life? I feel like I'm missing out here ...

Comments

[caprices]

As one who flips between anxiety dreams (mostly involving work) and Madcap Fantasy Adventure, the MFA dream is way more fun. On the other hand, if I am diligent about dream journalling, I can usually pick out the truly bizarre elements from the work dreams that otherwise just blend into a sense of mundane frustration. So it can change from "ugh, just dreamed about work again" to "huh, weird dream." For instance, climbing up a chute while dodging frozen pieces of necropsy specimens is fortunately NOT a feature of my workplace.

[tealin]

I think the weirdest thing to have happened in a travel anxiety dream, for me, is the door to my hotel room being too small for a normal sized human being to get through. Not just short, more like the size of one of those niches in the wall of a medieval church. Other than that, the weirdness comes in cities not quite being a real city (a hybrid London/San Francisco is common), or train lines that don't exist, or other inventions of my subconscious to fill a hole not supplied by memory. Climbing up a chute while dodging frozen pieces of necropsy specimens would be a MFA by comparison!

[tigeranne]

My dreams are.... something. I do have bus dreams from time to time, but my typical anxiety dream is about cell phones. Either I'm not able to dial the number, because the keypad is malfunctioning, or I've got to call my late mother and I don't know her number. Sometimes I've got to call for an ambulance, because someone's in the process of dying from something. If I get through at all, I can't understand or hear what's being said in the other end, or they don't understand me.

Twice in my life I've dreamt about finding someone's penis that had fallen off. One was in a mailbox, the other in a glass of water on the kitchen counter. x( I still remember how incredibly upset I was about the fact that it was all very not normal, and that my friends didn't live in families where that happened.

[tealin]

Argh, that's incredibly stressful! I used to dream about not having the right change in the right currency to use a pay phone – or the number for a person I knew in the country I was visiting – but for whatever reason that's gone now, along with not having or not being able to use my bank cards. Funny.

You don't suppose the penises were symbolic of cigars? ;)

[tigeranne]

To be honest, I don't know what to think about the detachable penises. I've read somewhere that if you dream of slugs, the slugs represent the peenzors as something disgusting. I happen to be incredibly disgusted by slugs to the point of paranoid phobia, so my brain may instead have substituted a penis because an actual slug would be too much.

In another article I read, penises were supposed to represent intrusion, but not necessarily sexually. The person whose penis was in our kitchen was someone in my parents' closest circle when I was a teen, and he was always around. Without going into details or speaking ill of the dead; He had an unknown degree of negative influence on my life and mental health, because of his very bleak outlook on most things. I honestly wanted to see less of him. Then he died, there was a lot of emotional drama, and his absence left things far more unstable than they had been.

In the dream I had last year, the conundrum seemed to be more that I had "borrowed" someone's mail, and it turned out that he kept the amputated tip of his penis in his post box at a local Coop-OBS. It was in a specially designed capsule to stop it from drying out. O_o Why am I telling you this, would you want to know???? Anyway, I was absolutely horrified at the idea of being caught with that. His personal mail, not so much. I returned everything to his post box as fast as I could, only to discover that he was standing right behind me! So I told a lie about having received mail addressed to him, and it was fine.

I really don't want to know what it says about me.

[tealin]

See, this is why I don't understand people who think telling people about dreams is boring to the point of rudeness – because this is fascinating!

I can kind of see where some universal dream tropes could have some sort of universal coded meaning, at least within a broader culture. I also know that if I dreamed of slugs it would almost certainly be because I'm in a running war with the slugs in my garden, and garden pests absolutely represent themselves in my dreams – they, and my regular recurring dreams of finding previously unknown bits of the house falling down, are anxiety over the responsibility of looking after this place. (I love looking after it, but it's a far greater responsibility than I've ever had before.) If I were living in a flat in central Vienna, slugs would have to be symbolic ...

Regarding your parents' friend, I wonder if it's something as simple as ... he was a dick?

The mailbox one is much more mysterious – I guess that's about as private and embarrassing a thing as one could ever fear being exposed, but it's amazing the convolutions gone to, to get that idea to work! Though with the fabled history of mail-order porn, maybe it's not as enormous a leap as it might be.

[tigeranne]

The guy wasn't really a dick, at least I don't think he meant to be. Well, not to me. He retold a conversation he'd had with his neighbour where he certainly acted the part of one.

How are you killing the slugs? Most people I know have very hands-on methods, like skewering them on a spike and depositing them into a bucket of bleach. I'm just too disgusted to be able to do that, so I throw salt. This limits me to getting the ones that are nowhere near any plants. Do you have the brown cannibal slugs over in Britain? BTW, last night I dreamt about trying not to step on long, furry slugs. I think I was hunting for cryptids in Texas(!!) and the slugs shouldn't be in such a dry climate according to my calculations.

Ohai, I have house disrepair nightmares too!

[tealin]

I was so besieged by slugs in my Cambridge garden that I very quickly got over any squeamishness about them – my favoured method for slug disposal is snipping them in half with scissors. It's very disgusting but it gets the job done, and is both quicker and more absolute than salt, which they can shrug off if they're not saturated in it. Plus, then you can dump their sluggy bodies into the planters and they can feed the plants that they were going to eat! There's something satisfying about that. I've heard beer traps work well, and I have friends who swear by copper as a repellent, but nothing beats a dedicated morning of slug-snipping for decimating the population in one's garden. If you leave pots upside down they like to hide out in them during the daytime, which makes your job easier.

We have a few different slugs here – there is a brown one with a mantle but I don't know if it's a cannibal. There's another brown one that has a sort of orange flecked skirt, which is apparently invasive from Spain, and starting to take over because the mild winters aren't killing it anymore. We had a pretty hard winter last year, and I didn't notice any letup in the slugs, so the Spanish slug hasn't taken over yet!