Dream Catcher: 07/29/17

By Jonathan Lam on 07/28/17

Tagged: dream-catcher

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I wanted to start a dream journal, because it just seemed like a fun thing to keep track of. Here's an update from last night:

—

As with all dreams, the highest resolution comes when you wake up, at the very end of the dream.

So I woke up, and I couldn't really breathe. Really. It wasn't that I was hyperventilating, or that I was scared. It was a strange leftover pain from last night in my chest. I think it was dust from cleaning the house or grease and other chemicals from the garage, but I'm not sure.

I was running right before I woke up. Running to the top of a mountain. It was a rest stop, and we had before 8:00p.m., when my photography team and I would have a photo shoot. It was around 6:00p.m. at that moment.

We (I'm not sure who was with me, but I remember a group of ten to twenty people) had just been filming some sort of mock fighting scene. Imagine an ancient Roman infantry charge, scaled down to a dozen people. There were a few takes, and eventually we called it a day. Nothing too intensive.

I remember driving there. The surrounding area was something suburban, with idyllic green grass on the road dividers and on the sides. On the drive I remember pulling into a short dead-end street— no sidewalk, no houses, and you could see the end; just asphalt replacing a length of grass— and practicing parallel parking like I have been doing, repeatedly on the curb. I pulled out and left to the filming scene when other cars pulled into the same street, presumably also to practice parking.

—

That's all I remember. It's funny that, although I was shaken awake by my dad, there was no climax at the moment of awakening like there usually is. But there was that continuity into real life— the chest pain— that brought this dream to life. And then there's the setup— the driving and the fight scene and the hill— as if my mind is conjuring up some extremely long-winded explanation for the pain. I wish we understood dreams better from any perspective, scientific or otherwise.

So if anyone asks, I got my chest pain from a battle charge I led against Julius Caesar in 62 B.C. And if they ask why it still hurts, some two millenia later, it's because we were defeated. End of story.