Occam's Razor

Now that I’m dreaming again, I am noticing some recurring themes. Apparently, I stopped dreaming for many years, probably for decades, due to moderate sleep apnea. Sigmund Freud would probably have a field day analyzing these dreams. Most dreams tend to be ephemeral, thus hard to remember, but some keep recurring enough or have enough emotional impact that you remember them when you are awake. Here are four for your amusement. Loss of control or rather, fear of loss of control seems to be a recurring theme in my dreams, which suggests I project an aura of certainty, which would not surprise frequent readers of this blog.

Is there a bathroom in the house?

I bet this is a very common dream. Maybe it is a condition of middle age, when your bladder is more problematic and you want some assurance that a toilet is not too far away. The dream does not vary much but the thrust is always the same: I need to go really bad, but no matter which restroom I try, I cannot get relief. Curiously, I always need to go #1, not #2 in these dreams. And so I spend inordinate amounts of dream time searching desperately for a working toilet or urinal. But they are always full. There’s either a line of guys out the door waiting to use the urinals, or the toilets are cracked, broken, or so completely filthy that even a desperate human could not possibly use them. So I go in quest of another bathroom while the problem gets continuously more acute, and each subsequent restroom has the same issues, and is often worse.

Sometimes in desperation I look for a discreet spot outside to go, but just when I think I have found such a spot and am about to expose my privates, I find that someone is observing, so no relief is possible.

Eventually my conscious mind stumbles to wakefulness and I realize that I really do have to go, and this is my body’s imperfect way of telling me this. So I stumble into the bathroom, which us middle aged men do a couple of times a night anyhow, do my business and hope the dream will not recur.

The very high cliff

Here is another dream which I believe is very common. Some say it goes back to being “weightless” in utero. Basically it involves an oops moment. Somehow I stumble off a very high cliff and fall toward the ground. I am, of course, scared out of my mind and convinced I am moments from death. The curious thing is that in real life you probably would fall to your death and be dead a few seconds later. But in the dream you never actually make it to impact, you are just incredibly scared by this total loss of control and impending total destruction. The scariness builds on top of the scariness and just goes on and on until the rational part of my brain finally kicks in, wherein I groggily awake and then do what I often do when I awake in the middle of the night: shuffle off to the bathroom because my bladder wants me to go anyhow.

The seductress

This is my favorite dream. Its downside is it never lasts long enough. It involves intimate carnal knowledge of a woman, usually much younger, who is totally hot and totally wants my body for some unexplained and irrational reason because, trust me, I’m not anyone any hot and young babe is going to pursue, even if I didn’t have the wedding ring. Like most great seductions, it seems that the most enjoyable part comes before actual carnal knowledge, i.e. the anticipation of the carnal knowledge and some sort of magic charisma I don’t actually possess. Anyhow, usually she is not only totally hot, but she is exotic, typically Asian. I find Asian women in general attractive, so I’m not surprised they often appear in my erotic dreams. Suffice to say they are not pursing me in real life. Sometimes I actually proceed to sex acts with these women, but usually it ends about the time penetration or oral sex begins, darn it.

I wish I could stay in these dreams, but unlike others like the bathroom dream where I can’t seem to get out of them, my consciousness usually quickly wakes me up with an “Oh, get real!” It’s either my consciousness or I’m tuning into my wife’s gentle snoring. In short, there is no way to actually achieve satiety in this dream. The perfect sexual experience, impossible in real life, is impossible for me in dreamland as well.

The reluctant protector

This one happened last night around four a.m. It sure was strange, so strange that I actually remembered it. I have a lot of dreams on similar themes: I am in situations I don’t particularly want to be in, and I struggle to get free but can’t quite make it free. The more I struggle, the worse it gets. This one involved kids and youth, which was weird. They were drawn to be because (a) I’m an adult (b) they see me as something like a knight in armor, i.e. a good man in a bad world. Meanwhile, all around them all sorts of bad things are happening which put them, but not me, in jeopardy. I’m not sure what these bad things are exactly, but they are pretty nasty and they need protection. So they huddle around me, latching on tightly with hands, legs, fingers, anything they can desperately, because they think I will save them. They cry out to me and drill me with their desperate and panicky eyes. And it becomes too much from me. I must get free from them so I push them off me as fast as I can, to their wailing, consternation and my feelings of guilt. Yet for everyone I manage to push off, two more latch on, so eventually there are kids five or six layers deep surrounding me, needing me, and expecting me to protect them. I simply cannot because I don’t have a free hand. All I really want is to be free of the burden and go rest somewhere, alone, in the quiet.

If there are any armchair psychologists, real or wannabees out there, feel free to tell me what these dreams mean. They must mean something as they generally recur frequently. I wish I could dream of something more entertaining for a change.