The house was surrounded by bears. They were, I must admit, not very convincing bears -- my dreamatorium didn't seem to be able to generate realistic grizzlies. Instead, these bears looked like actors in bear costumes. Even though they were silent, they were menacing and I was frightened. I remained inside the house trying to protect some children who may or may not have been my own offspring. I thought, if I just fire my pistol into the air a few times, I should be able to scare the bears and drive them away. So I started to look around for my pistol, but no luck. I searched the drawers, several of them, and also looked through my luggage. No weapon. Then I had a revelation. I remembered that it's not in this dream that I have a pistol -- that was in an earlier dream, a few days or a few weeks ago. If there's no pistol, how do I deal with the bears? I was out of ideas, but just then a woman, not someone known to me, but middle-aged and blonde, appeared, and inquired, do you want me to get rid of the bears? What is your plan, I asked, and she responded, with the "performance." A "performance"? She added that it would cost me a bit of money but that we would settle about the payment later. I agreed with the plan and told her to go ahead with the performance. Which she did -- she gathered a number of people, including some very young children, who formed themselves into a circle and sang a song (more like a chant) and danced. The performance chased the bears away, so I woke up. I never did settle with her about the fee.
It wasn't my best dream -- but it's not entirely without interest. I'd give it a B-plus at most. I admire the details about the wrong-dream pistol and about the "performance." By the way, I've never owned a pistol and haven't had a weapon in my hands since ROTC in college, and I have no idea why my dreamatorium is so convinced that I did so.
I continue to be amazed that my nighttime life is so much more inventive than my daytime. In actuality, I'm not at all an imaginative person. When I set out to write fiction or poetry, which I have done at various times in my life, it's a disaster. The truth is that I have nothing to say. No plots, no situations, no dialogue, no wit, no insights. And yet, night after night, I find myself in crazy, bizarre but also imaginative situations. I wake myself out of dreams, like this one, that refer back to past dreams -- as if Tuesday's dream, were a continuation of Monday's and Monday's a piece of a continuing narrative -- as if my dreams were chapters of a long novel or perhaps episodes in a TV serial.
My dreams are almost always nightmares. I'm lost in a strange city, can't find my way back home. Surrounded, defenseless and alone, among enemies. Infinite variations on themes of helplessness and hopelessness.
The pleasant dreams are very few but they can be inventive and fun. Once I dreamed that I could swim like a fish, not by flailing my arms but rather by swiveling my entire body. I was as as quick as a pickerel. And several times, I had gravity-defying dreams in which I compete in the long jump, but don't come down, just skim along the surface of the earth like a Greek goddess. A very liberating fantasy.
It wouldn't be difficult to interpret the bear-pistol-performance dream. Life is dangerous (the bears), there are possible remedies (the pistol), but community support (the performance) is more effective than individual action. If I were feeling Jungian, I could find all sorts of bear or half-bear archetypes in the folklore. I'm absolutely positive that sometime during the long haul from the Olduvai Gorge to Ellis Island, one or more of my ancestors, living in a cave or a daub-and-wattle hovel, faced off against carnivorous creatures. Perhaps the dream emerges from some atavistic portion of my brain or is embedded in my DNA.
But I don't believe it. I attach little meaning to dreams. Surely, they reflect one's anxieties, but they don't predict the future or explain the deeper mysteries of life. I think that they're nothing more than the chemical circuits of the brain going haywire. It takes a lot of effort to keep the synapses under control, and when we sleep, those controls are compromised. We become unhinged. Didn't WS say something like lunatics and dreamers are of imagination all compact? Or did he? Well, lunacy and dream and imagination are closely related, whether he said it or not.
