My girlfriend tells me that she has dreams where she's cheating on me - in a variety of ways, and with a variety of people - on a semi-regular basis. Some she has described in detail, others she waves away as another symptom of her pervasive anxiety. It's quite strange from an outsider's point of view, and particularly because the closest I ever had to something similar was a dream (which I thought I'd written about here, but couldn't find quickly) in which it transpired that my girlfriend was secretly married to Simon Pegg. More recently, however, I had one where I was on my way to some kind of event - possibly a lecture - with one of my colleagues (marking the first time in a long while that I've had a dream involving anyone I've worked with). It was dark evening and, for the most part, we seemed to be walking through parkland - that is, there was lots of grass either side of a tarmac path, and streetlights regularly spaced along the path. We were walking along and chatting about work and geeky things, when we realised we could cut through some kind of shopping centre as a quicker route to our destination. The most direct route turned out to be through a shop with lots of glass cabinets - possibly one of those weird 'gift shop' things that has everything from dragon/fairy statues to model cars to novelty clocks to candles - run by a pair of young women. My colleague - actually engaged to be married - got chatting to one of the two while I browsed the shop on the way toward the exit. As he caught up, the woman he'd been talking to kissed him. I wondered out loud what his fiancée would make of that, and why I hadn't had the same treatment. There was no response to the first question (other than my colleague looking extremely pleased with himself), but she said I didn't get a kiss for a reason... I can't remember the exact phrasing, but it was along the lines of either "because you wouldn't have appreciated it" (and make of that what you will) or just that she "didn't think it would have gone down as well" with me as it did with my colleague. We made our exit and headed off down into what seemed to be a kind of underpass in the park on the other side of the shop... but I woke up before we reached our destination.
There are actually times, in real life, that I think I'm a terrible friend for my best mate - it used to be that we'd regularly go to the cinema (obviously depending on there being something worth seeing) or to conventions or other events. This year, due to my finances being quite precarious, generally feeling quite tired, and fairly often doing other things with my girlfriend, I haven't spent quite as much time with him as I used to, and I'm occasionally a bit worried by this. Most of my weekends seem to rocket by, either working on one of my other blogs, idly surfing the internet or just watching television, and it's not as if my girlfriend would mind if I went out... So there's a guilt element building up as well. That said, it's only been in the last week that I've had a dream where all this came to a head. I don't remember the details of the second dream at all, but I remember meeting up with this friend of mine and being all chummy as usual, but he was almost instantly hostile, pointing out in great detail how bad a friend I'd been lately - cancelling things, not being available for things, generally being a dick, those kinds of things - in such a vehement tone that it pretty much shocked me awake.
Rounding off this trio of strange vignettes was a little horror story involving possibly giant mutant/ghostly rats in a forest surrounding a cross between my old high school and Hogwarts. This dream appeared to come with a prequel or intro of some kind, where two young children (one evidently me) were wandering through a spooky forest at night, either with our father or looking for him. There was a sunken stream through the forest, small enough that we could jump from bank to bank, and we carried on, getting deeper and deeper into the forest until we came upon what must have been a nest of the creatures, as they started flooding out toward us. We ran, got out of the forest, and then - in true movie style - it cut to a sort of '30-ish years later' thing were I was attending a high school reunion, where the school buildings were a cross between those I remember of my actual school, those school buildings I've seen in TV shows and movies, and some kind of huge, sprawling, gothic castle. At one point, I was walking through the Science department, possibly hoping to meet some of my old teachers. At the end of the main corridor, the staircase I remember from my own high school lead down to a grand entrance hall, made up of ornately carved stone and lit by candles. A spiral staircase from there lead outside, to the non-existent foundations of the building - it appeared to be suspended only by the spiral staircase at this end, while the main part of the building was on a nearby area of raised ground. While it was sunny out, I noticed the forest nearby, and remembered the dark and spooky night from my youth, and headed back toward the entrance to the forest not quite sure how I hadn't previously realised how close the two places were... but woke up before reaching the treeline.
No comments:
Post a Comment