Dream code 102
When I first wrote about my dreams in March, I was worried about coming across as unhinged. The surreal is always difficult to express. Too many people dismiss dreams as mental garbage, but when this mental garbage has saved my life multiple times, I’m not about to start ignoring them.
Something else has been worrying me, too. With my new job (is it still new nearly three months in?), I get home exhausted from long hours and human interaction. I’ve been afraid that I’d be too tired to dream, that I’d black out and not dream at all, that even if I dreamed I’d forget the details upon waking… But it seems like my dreams have decided to be even more vivid now to get my full attention. When I do dream these days, the imagery and meaning lingers for quite a while later, even if I don’t write them down.
More juxtapositions
I become the subject of the dream, I become the protagonist. Many times, these positions switch within the same dream.
This phenomenon keeps happening. It’s still very true since I wrote those words down. More recently, the switch-ups have happened with people who have a message for me but no opportunity to say it in waking.
How do I know I’ve flipped? In the dream, I look and sound like myself, but I exhibit a specific behavior that I’d absolutely never do in real life. For example, I dreamed I was having a talk with someone, a man, who wanted to use a PC. In the course of the dream I got distracted and he took the PC and used it. I thought he’d only need it for like 10 minutes, but he spent hours and hours and I had work to do. I then proceeded to throw myself on the floor and cry like a toddler with a tantrum.
On waking I knew, “That cannot be me.” It turned out it was a former colleague who wanted her old job back. It was weird. I was both the colleague and the man at the same time. Symbols like these often throw me off. It takes me a long time to figure them out.
Gender flips
This one is a little different from the juxtapositions. This is where someone who is male in real life appears in my dream as a woman, or vice versa, and I get confused a lot until I watch their behavior. What this usually means (it’s yet to be wrong) is that the person is in the closet.
For example, I can have interactions with a woman in waking, could be at school or work or any other normal context. Then, in my dreams, I interact the same way in the same places but with a man instead. So, the man in my dream behaves like the woman I know in real life, and it’s jarring to say the least. Then, when I meet them next, it all clicks. This is a rainbow person.
I’d say these dreams are an important part of my gaydar. I live in Kenya, where homosexuality is not only taboo but illegal. LGBT people have to truly camouflage themselves because there are serious repercussions if they don’t. But it seems there’s something about them that my intuition picks up when I meet them, which my dreams clarify later on. It tells me that their secrets are safe with me, and that I won’t treat them any differently if they came out to me. After all, I wouldn’t be surprised that they were gay. I dreamed about it ages ago.
Come as you are
Now that I think about it, it’s rare that people in my dreams appear as they are in real life. Maybe it’s the symbolism aspect of it, that my dreams will rarely be literal, so people will also take on different characteristics. Sometimes, though, there are some people who are exactly as they are in both dreams and waking. In my experience, these are authentic people, rare finds.
My dreams are almost always warnings or prophesies or clarifications of things I’m struggling with in my day-to-day. People are complex, of course, and they need deciphering a lot of the time. We really are hanging in there, carrying our burdens and making the best out of life. So, this is what I usually see in my dreams. When a person appears and behaves in my dream just like in real life, I appreciate it a lot. It means I know where I stand with the person. It’s a welcome relief.
A little sunshine would be nice
I’ve had maybe five dreams that were happy or hopeful or sweet. That’s an appallingly low number for at least three decades’ worth of dreaming. This doesn’t mean that they’re all bad dreams, although I’ve lost count of the true nightmares I’ve had over the years.
Most of my dreams are reality checks of a kind, and if my reality is less than pleasant, I can’t expect my mind to conjure up unicorns and bliss on a regular basis. My external circumstances would have to change drastically for my dreams to be less bleak. Even then, I’d still dream. I don’t see an end to it.
