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01/29/2007: "one wild dream last night"
I dream very regularly, and more often than not remember my dreams. In some instances the dreams stay with me for a very long time, especially if they involve powerful emotions in them. I still remember one dream I had as a kid, simply because it had an impact on me.
Last night I had a very interesting dream. I'm not sure what to make of it (if anything) but I thought I'd share it.
It starts out with me cutting through a metal structure. I find a technique for cutting with my reciprocating saw that makes cutting extremely fast, and effortless. I no time at all I've cut out what I wanted to remove from the cubical structure. At this point I look out the window and see that the building I am in is not very far away from the shoreline, at the top of a small but steep hill. I see that there are some pretty big waves coming in. Suddenly one wave grows into a giant wave even taller than the building, and all I can do is duck behind the wall while it crashes over the building. The wall shelters me a little bit, but the building is destroyed. Now everyone in the building must escape, so we climb up a brick retaining wall (that is covered in water) up to a higher hill. From here I help direct people down a path to where we should be safe. Some people ask about another path further away from the shore, and I tell them where it is, but mention that they probably don't need to bother finding it as we're safe enough on this path. As we travel down this path I come to some sort of water crossing. It's sort of like lift locks, but ones I've never seen before. The path meets the locks perpendicularily, and on either side in the water there is a long black rubber hump to step on. I step on one and jump onto the other to get to the other side, avoiding the open water in the middle. An elderly couple steps on to the first rubber hump, but then it starts suddenly descending into the water - the lock (or whatever it is) has become activated. The two people can do nothing but just stand there and sink into the water. I am greatly alarmed, and after seeing the couple fully submerged, still standing on the hump, I jump in and grab the woman. With much struggling and hard swimming I finally manage to get us both back to the water's surface. To my dismay, nobody else had jumped in to save the old man, and he is now out of reach, beyond saving.
While the tsunami-like wave was a pretty intense part of that dream, it pales in comparision to watching, horrified, as an elderly couple simply sinks down into the water without warning. And knowing that one of them was not saved was even worse.
What does it mean? I have no clue - I'm not versed in dream analysis by any stretch of the imagination. There does seem to be a thread of control throughout this dream - me controlling how I cut the metal, having the wave exert control over me, controlling what path people take to get to safety, not having control of the rubber humps, exerting what little control I have to save the woman, but not having enough to save the man... Yeah, control. So what THAT means... your guess is probably as good as mine. Am I dealing with control issues in my life? Probably - but they certainly haven't been identified, at least by me.
