
I had a major breakthrough (I think) regarding a recurring dream that’s been bugging me for the longest time. This recurring dream comes in various forms and guises, but the theme is always the same: my life is always threatened by something that is randomly deadly, but somehow finds its way, specifically to me. For instance, I see a plane in the sky that’s about to crash, and of all the places that it would fall, it goes straight to where I run. It doesn’t matter which shelter I seek safety under, the plane will fall THERE. Or the hotel I’m in is suddenly overrun by terrorists, and out of the hundreds of rooms in the frooking hotel, they enter mine. Or this giant snake that starts eating people in the U.P. Sunken Garden suddenly focuses on me, even if I were on the top floor of a nearby building. It has all those people to eat, but it sees ME, and wants to eat ME. The latest version of this dream, I recounted while I was on air with Delle. I was in the old house where I grew up in, and there was word that a wolf was on the prowl. I ran up to my old room, my inner sanctum, locked the doors, jammed the heaviest furniture against it, and crouched in the corner farthest from the door. The light was off the whole time, and as I shivered in my dark corner in fear, I suddenly felt a presence. As I looked to my left, I realized the wolf was right next to me, staring straight at me with its beady red eyes. The end of all these dreams is my obvious death, but the dreams are always cut before the actual death (since I don’t think we can die in our dreams; at least I don’t). Delle had many insights on what the dreams could mean. Many of her insights actually make a lot of sense, but she asked me to do one thing: to face the MONSTER, whatever form it takes the next time around.
Delle instructed that the next time I get this type of dream, to will myself to face the threat head on. I argued that I wouldn’t “know” that I’m dreaming, because I’d be awake if I “knew” I was in a dream. Delle said it’s possible, and that should I wake in the middle of the dream, to will myself to come back to the dream to face the threat. I thought about it for about 5 minutes, then like many of my thoughts, it got filed somewhere in the back of my head for future reference, oftentimes buried forever in the muck and morass of my mind.
Then, just last night, it happened. It was “that kind of dream”. In it, I was in a forest with my sister and brother. Okay fine, don’t laugh. In the dream, my sister was Beyonce, and my brother was Stifler in “American Pie”. We were riding in a buggy, it hit a fallen log, and we all dived headfirst into a puddle of mud. When we got up, we saw from afar, that the ruckus we created caught the attention of a huge grizzly bear. I started muttering under my breath, “A bear, a bear, a bear…” and started running towards a nearby house, with my siblings, Beyonce and Stifler, not far behind me. By the time we reached the house the grizzly was practically nipping at our heels! He was so big and so fast that we had that sickening feeling at the pit of our stomachs that there was NO WAY that we could outrun him, and that it’s just a matter of time before we’re dead. A few seconds later I was on the floor, on my back, with the grizzly standing on its hind legs, standing right above me, with his white teeth bared, growling menacingly. The overwhelming feeling was helplessness; that there was absolutely NOTHING I could do, and that I was completely POWERLESS to change the outcome. I braced myself for the impact, as the ursine giant lunged downward towards me…
End of dream.
I didn’t wake up, at least I don’t remember waking up, but I swear I felt myself “rewind” the dream, with the distinct purpose of changing the outcome. It was almost as if I was saying, “This is MY dream, dammit, and what I say goes!” So I go back to the part where I was on the floor and the bear was standing above me. Instead of just laying there awaiting my doom, suddenly I discover air vents nearby which connected the different floors of the house. So with inhuman speed, I leapt towards the nearest vent and slid down, to the next lower floor. Then I found another vent leading to another floor, and another vent, and so on, until I found myself on the ground floor, far away from the reaches of the angry bear (Presto, suddenly the house was multi-level!). Then my sister Beyonce appears out of nowhere, shaken but alive, as she falls into my arms crying, while Stifler waves from afar (apparently he got out much earlier than me or Beyonce).
But that’s beside the point. The point is, for the first time since this type of dream started recurring, I faced the monster that always got me. For the first time, I stood up to something that I always felt powerless against. For the first time, I LIVED. Okay, I don’t really know if all this cockamamie mumbo-jumbo means anything, but it was a breakthrough nevertheless. It was the dream that beat the odds. This augurs well coming at the end of the year, with the new one just around the corner. Whatever it means, if ever it even means anything, it feels good. It feels like the ending of “Jaws”, when they killed the shark. Suddenly, it feels safe to swim at the beach again. At least that’s what I’ll choose to think. Hopefully I’ll have as much cojones to face 2009 as I did when I faced that grizzly, and hopefully, I’ll beat the odds as well in the waking world.
Have I killed my MONSTER for good? We’ll see….






