Dreaming

A particularly vivid dream woke me early this morning.  In it I am trying to drive home in a tiny electric powered wheelchair on the Seattle Freeway with a friend standing on it behind and a toddler granddaughter in my lap.  I am actually keeping up with the traffic when something clicks and I realize what a crazy thing this is and take the first exit I can find which puts me in an older section of downtown Seattle that exists only in my memory but had many transient hotels, hole in the wall restaurants, and small shops.  It looks like the spot near Pike Street where 45 years ago, I used to transfer buses on my way to work from Queen Anne to South Seattle.

Then my dream turns nightmarish, my chair loses power and just barely makes it into a small, nearly empty diner.  I begin having an asthma attack.  I ask them to call a cab for me.  Being a dream I have my cell phone on me in this early 60's scene, and my asthma meds which didn't exist then either.  The waitress hands me a card holder with the personal business cards of dozens of cabbies but she calls the first one for me, he wants to know if the chair is small and will go in the trunk, it will.  She leaves the cards just in case. 

The dream coffee I ordered arrives in tiny blue and white painted china cups.  A few more customers come in; one sits down next to me and lights up a cigarette and I ask him with difficulty not to smoke. I am so breathless I can hardly talk.  (I hate dreams like this)  He complies but in this dream other people begins smoking and I have to get up and struggle near them to make my whispered request.  Each time I return to my seat I find someone has drunk my coffee and also my water.  The waitress keeps bringing more and each time I take my eyes off it, it's gone.  Something wakeful in my brain enters into the dream and I realize I must be having trouble breathing.  I wake up.  I use a c-Pap machine and my nose is plugged and the nasal pillows are just blowing air into the room, my mouth is horribly dry, I'm thirsty, and I really am wheezing. 

I've always had an active dream life.  Sometimes in my dreams the action is easy to understand, asthma during sleep always gives me dreams about chest pains, gasping, and the like and I wake up to take care of it.  Driving especially in something peculiar or a car that won't go no matter how you press the gas pedal is usually anxiety I've been shoving down.  What about the smoking but responsive people and disappearing coffee mean?  I will think about it today. 

Sometime in the 70's I took a dream class to learn what was called active dreaming.  The idea was that often what happened during your day supplied material for dreams and you could use that productively by thinking and acting on things you wanted or needed solutions for.  You kept a dream journal by your bed to jot notes so you didn't forget.  I was searching for ideas for my art.  It worked.  And later I found as a programmer, thinking and puzzling over a nasty logic snag in code right before bed often produced the answer for me at daylight.  The brain is a wonderful thing.  It also taught a kind of self analysis by taking an item, say last night's little blue and white dream cup the coffee came in and saying "I am a blue and white cup of coffee."  Then you explain to yourself how that feels.  I think things like "I'm utilitarian and attractive."  "I'm sturdy, solidly made but I can be broken."  And, this just came to me, "I am constantly filled up but my contents keep going to somewhere other than where they are needed."  I think I haven't filled my own needs lately.  Think I will dig deeper through this today, after I get a real cup of coffee.