Dreamland

“To sleep, perchance to dream,” Hamlet soliloquized. For me there’s no “perchance” about it. For the past month or so I’ve been dreaming what seems like all night—long involved dreams. I wonder why all of a sudden I’m dreaming these lengthy, complicated things. None of them are even close to being nightmares, just surprisingly complex. Sometimes I’m much younger, like back to my twenties, sometimes about forty, rarely my actual age. I try to remember them long enough to write them down but I never get around to it, and then they’re gone, like wisps of memory. Over the years my dreams have had recurring motifs. I seem to dream often about having two or three cars, never very good cars, and I always seem to have misparked them and when I look for them they’re gone, stolen. My most frequent dream involves golf. Most of them are negative in that I’m always losing my ball, or finding a bunch of balls none of which are mine and most of which are lopsided or squishy soft. Often I find my ball in a place that makes it nearly impossible to hit it, like up against a tree or some other obstruction. And often it’s either late in the evening or even at night, and I go out in the dark. And the fairways are often dark and heavily treed and crossed by deep gulleys. See, not pleasant golf associations. Rarely, I dream that I’m swinging really well and the ball is going straight and true. Much more often I’m hitting into trouble. Golf dreams, or at least golf mixed in, make up at least a fourth of my nightlife. Another dream thread involves my college attendance. I dream that I never quite get around to getting a degree, that I’ve skipped classes too often and sometimes never consulted with my major advisor, and I always feel so guilty about it. Dreams about New York City recur about once a month. Almost always there’s a section of the city I really like, with bookstores and large department stores where I can buy stuff I really like, mainly books. But there’s also a dark side I either have to drive through or walk through and it’s a section inhabited by really bad people. Always, the way home or back to where I’m staying is to the west, either by car or by bus or by rail, sometimes on foot. Sometimes I dream that I’m in a large store with many rooms and sections I have to make my way through, sometimes a series of apartments or hotel rooms that go on and on. And sometimes I dream of a girl/woman whom I’ve engaged somehow (by dates or by proposals of marriage) and I’ve neglected to call her or see her and I always feel so guilty about it. That smacks too much of my real life, leaving friends and acquaintances and girlfriends behind, neglecting to hang on to them. Then there are all the teaching dreams. I have one of these every week or so. Some of them are pleasant, involving teaching in a classroom of attentive students and really teaching them something. But mostly they involve facing a roomful, and I mean a room “full,” of inattentive students who want only for the bell to ring so they can get out of there. Nothing ever violent, just that awful feeling of futility I used to get when I couldn’t get anyone to listen to me or pay any attention to my shouted instructions for quiet. In some of them I was in my last year before retirement and I couldn’t wait to get out. Or sometimes I’ve been rehired for a year or so after my initial retirement and again I couldn’t wait to get out of there. Anxious dreams. This morning I woke up directly from a dream in which I was in a narrow stall of some kind, using a hose to scrub off either the walls of the stall or myself. I was naked from the waist down and a woman attendant seemed to take great pleasure in looking in to see how I was doing, and I was equally pleased to have her look in at me. When I got done I was suddenly dressed again and about to leave. Then I realized I still hadn’t paid her the fee. When I reached for my billfold it wasn’t there and I was just positive it had dropped out when I took my pants off. So I searched around and found a tattered brown billfold that belonged to a young girl who was there. And then I discovered that my billfold was in my back pocket, that I had simply felt in the wrong place. And I showed the woman attendant where I had reached on my left buttock to find my billfold. I paid her with a $17 bill. I mentioned that to a marine who was there and he said, oh yes, he got those all the time, and then he took one out of his billfold. It was square, light tan and blank on one side and on the other, in red ink, it said “Paid in Full.” I asked him why he still carried it if it was already paid and he said, in the service, he had to carry it even though it had been paid. I then left and he and the others wished me a good day and I said it wasn’t so good. The wind was just howling through the trees. But later on I was going to take the train to Paisano City to visit an old friend who lived there not far from the train station. What a curious world our dream world is. Maybe that’s the reality and this waking world is only a dream.