. . . Dream part II

I have given more thought to my dream the other morning, just before waking. I can see two major, and related, underlying themes here. First, as a man sliding down the shortening slope of early old age, I think much on those who follow me. Some of them are living now, my two grandchildren being examples. I wonder when or if they will marry and have children. What will these unknown little great-grandchildren be like?

Secondly, I think often of my parents, and further back, my grandparents. They are behind me, dead several years and decades, respectively, and never saw the two imps of joy I spend so much wonderful time with now. The appearence of both parents at the beginning of the dream starts the encounter with the great chamber of light, with soaring towers of waiting infants, emphasizing the linking of past generations with present and future.

Some of the nuts and bolts of the structure are clearer to me now. The soaring and unbounded space of light in which the towers of chambers exist, each filled with a figure both infant and adult, probably is recycled from the first Riverworld book by Philip Jose Farmer. Maybe also a nod to the movie, The Matrix, with its vast energy-producing network based on individual humans.

I have no idea about the source or function of the Indian boy, other than he functions as a kind of valedictory for the dream, admonishing me to accept the dream as a source of strength.

“Dreams are funny, aren’t they, Daddy?” An approximate line from Come Back, Little Sheba, a movie I had never seen until my Beloved Babs brought home a video. A stark, unstinting view of some of the same questions I believe under gird my dream.

Whatever.

What’s In a Dream…

…was the subtitle of a book my great-grandfather wrote, allegedly with his wife, on the meaning of dreams. Not the Freudian sense of meaning, but the foretelling the future sense. My favorite was the one for a woman dreaming of shortness of breath: You are soon to purchase a girdle. It should be noted that my great-grandfather was co-owner of a department store in Chattanooga, TN.

Entertainment aside, I have always been interested in how dreams make use of thoughts and actions of the day before, taking quotidian bits and pieces and fashioning them into a narrative completely new.