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i dremt i dremt: 3 untypical anxiety dreams in succession in one night
1: I was towards the front of a crowd of people being charged by police on horseback — i got out of the way by running back through the crowd along the top of a railing (not the spiky kind, the aluminium tubing kind you'd maybe see at a cattle market or similar).
2: I was in a very very spacious modern leisure centre/concert hall/conference hall type space, which had many levels and stairways and balconies and so on, and large floor to ceiling windows on most of the outer walls. There were a lot of people there, everyone in elaborate Venetian carnival-level fancy dress: present for some kind of huge awayday team-bonding role-playing game, in which we were required en masse to submit to a not-yet-very-clearly specified, mildly authoritarian regime for the duration of the game. I was cheerfully boasting about how little I'd be playing along; ppl were trying to shush me or moving away from me, saying "They'll hear, you know," and similar. As the main hall emptied, with ppl moving off to their allotted spaces, it became clear that they had heard: that I was still here, without an allotted role I'd be informed of, because I had been allotted a darker and more frightening role without being told -- perhaps of ritual scapegoat, or anyway of the only person in the game that it wouldn't turn out just to be a game for. I was beginning to imagine difficult encounters and confrontations and worse; and wondering if it wasn't already too late to start playing properly or safely, or just leave — and also strongly feeling that actually I *wanted* to confront whoever it was going to be, and morally face them down. Except was I really made for this kind of stuff? Can I handle pain or prison?
3: an elderly and valued colleague was leaving the company, and we had gathered in someone's home to see her off, give her her card and present, celebrate her time with us, and have a nice party. The colleague in fact being an old lady who lived down the village where I grew up, an extremely sour-looking woman (known to cheekier locals as "lemonface") with an unexpected, almost twinkly sense of very very dry humour: she died, in her late 90s, about ten years ago. I was worried I was late; I was early. I started to wonder if having bare feet was appropriate; and had I remembered to sign her card (which she was looking at)? She handed it to me, and I began to read it: what looked like a very tidy list of names turned out to be a list of roles that the card's writer was saying, in a vast paragraph written in tiny very neat letters, she had played, symbolically, in her job: "mother, chef, cop..." it began.
The third doesn't seem much like the other two in terms of actual sense of threat to me, but the level of anxiety I was feeling was really much the same. Without the anxiety, the third is also more like the kinds of dreams I often have -- the first two, the first especially, not so much.
(I haven't been writing dreams up much recently -- mainly because I don't seem to have been having memorable ones for a long time. I don't really know how this works: it seems to go in phases, but I don't know what it relates to.)
2: I was in a very very spacious modern leisure centre/concert hall/conference hall type space, which had many levels and stairways and balconies and so on, and large floor to ceiling windows on most of the outer walls. There were a lot of people there, everyone in elaborate Venetian carnival-level fancy dress: present for some kind of huge awayday team-bonding role-playing game, in which we were required en masse to submit to a not-yet-very-clearly specified, mildly authoritarian regime for the duration of the game. I was cheerfully boasting about how little I'd be playing along; ppl were trying to shush me or moving away from me, saying "They'll hear, you know," and similar. As the main hall emptied, with ppl moving off to their allotted spaces, it became clear that they had heard: that I was still here, without an allotted role I'd be informed of, because I had been allotted a darker and more frightening role without being told -- perhaps of ritual scapegoat, or anyway of the only person in the game that it wouldn't turn out just to be a game for. I was beginning to imagine difficult encounters and confrontations and worse; and wondering if it wasn't already too late to start playing properly or safely, or just leave — and also strongly feeling that actually I *wanted* to confront whoever it was going to be, and morally face them down. Except was I really made for this kind of stuff? Can I handle pain or prison?
3: an elderly and valued colleague was leaving the company, and we had gathered in someone's home to see her off, give her her card and present, celebrate her time with us, and have a nice party. The colleague in fact being an old lady who lived down the village where I grew up, an extremely sour-looking woman (known to cheekier locals as "lemonface") with an unexpected, almost twinkly sense of very very dry humour: she died, in her late 90s, about ten years ago. I was worried I was late; I was early. I started to wonder if having bare feet was appropriate; and had I remembered to sign her card (which she was looking at)? She handed it to me, and I began to read it: what looked like a very tidy list of names turned out to be a list of roles that the card's writer was saying, in a vast paragraph written in tiny very neat letters, she had played, symbolically, in her job: "mother, chef, cop..." it began.
The third doesn't seem much like the other two in terms of actual sense of threat to me, but the level of anxiety I was feeling was really much the same. Without the anxiety, the third is also more like the kinds of dreams I often have -- the first two, the first especially, not so much.
(I haven't been writing dreams up much recently -- mainly because I don't seem to have been having memorable ones for a long time. I don't really know how this works: it seems to go in phases, but I don't know what it relates to.)