There are only two types of dreams for me.
1.) The standing-in-line-at-CVS dream, where I’m late for work and the line keeps getting longer kind of thing. You know, the least interesting parts of being regularly awake kind of dream.
Or,
2.) The cat turned into a person and told me the girl who owns the apartment secretly chopped up her boyfriend and hid him under the floor.* You know, the super murder-y kind of dream.
I used to keep a dream journal and write them all down when I woke up, but it turns out, this is quite hard to do. And you will scare your then-boyfriend who already thinks you might need help because of the “ghost incident.” So I stopped.
For about a year I was having plane crash dreams fairly consistently. This was nothing new, per se, since it followed closely on the heels of all the flying-death dreams. These, though, were all the same: the plane would get too close to a gold-domed building, shut down, and hover in mid-air like a Zack Morris timeout. It wasn’t the State House gold dome - it was matte, crowded in the midst of several blanched and European buildings.
Eventually we’d all get back in our seat, the plane would head out to sea and then it would crash without warning into the ocean and I’d play with some sea creatures amongst the wreckage.
I had a tiny book of dream meanings that I read cover to cover in high school. I memorized and terrorized my friends with everything I “knew.”
“Teeth falling out is actually like a good money omen,” I would say, unhelpfully, because no one wants to hear how great something is that fucked up their REM cycle.
“If you know you’re dreaming, it’s called a lucid dream, and it’s like hard to do,” I would say, even though I never know I’m dreaming and cannot wake up to save my life. I once slept through a tornado.
“Did you know you can’t read in dreams?” I would tell everyone this, even though I definitely learned it from watching Batman: The Animated Series, and still, in present day, have not vetted this information.
Nothing in that tiny book, nor Batman episodes, explained why a person would have murder-y dreams in general, and certainly made no mention of benign plane crash adventures.
The last time I came back from NYC, the bus took a detour to avoid some construction, and we drove through some small-ish city in Connecticut.** There, around a curve, was the gold-domed building, surrounded by stubby, white mid-rises. We drove slowly, and I pressed close to the bumpy window, feeling much the same as every time I see a ghost come to life.
I haven’t had the plane crash dreams since then. I’m sure the book would say something about having been there before, or that I worked through whatever it meant. And I do think there’s something to exorcising your demons by seeing them in the light.
But I’d like to know where Batman stands on this.
*Last night’s installment. Swear.
**Might have been any state really, I was obviously sleeping for the rest of the trip.