Dreamlife Feb. 27—Leslie (finally!)

You may be thinking around now, “I thought this was supposed to be a blog about both Robin and Leslie. Is Robin the only one who is going to post her dreams?” Well, here’s the problem. I’m not a good sleeper. Never have been. Whereas Robin has been known (at least by me) to nod off mid-word at night while we’re talking in bed, it can take me an hour or two to fall asleep.

So when I do finally get to sleep, I am loathe to do anything that will restart my insomnia, especially in the wee hours of the morning when my sleep is generally the deepest. The thing is, one’s longest REM sleep period—and hence the best time for dreaming—coincides with these early hours.


Since you tend to forget your dreams if you don’t record them immediately (by the time I get to the bathroom to go pee I’ve usually forgotten mine), you really need to record them as soon as you wake up. That means rousing your brain enough to grab that pen and paper by your bedside, think about what you just dreamed, and write legibly enough that you can decipher it in the morning. If I do that at 4:30 a.m., I know there’s a good chance I won’t be able get back to sleep again. So I lie there in bed trying to decide: should I wake up and write down my dream, or just try to remember it and go back to sleep?

The latter tends to win out. And of course I don’t remember. That’s why Robin has posted so many dreams and I have yet to.

The good news is that this morning I finally forced myself to write down a dream. Here it is, in all its glory:

Type: adventure, thriller
People: Carolyn B.
Featured: spy story

[Note: The book we have about learning to lucid dream tells us to underline in our dream journal things that could not possibly exist in our waking life. These are “dream signs,” and the point is that if you learn to recognize them while dreaming, this will be a trigger to realize you’re in a dream (i.e. to become lucid in your dream). The bits in the dream that are in italics are my dream signs.]

I am on a large cruise ship, piloting it into harbor, and there is Carolyn on her own, much smaller, ship. I nod toward mine and ask in a joking manner, “care to take her out for a spin?”

The scene shifts to a bench in some sort of sunken garden within a large hotel complex. (Or maybe it is someplace still on the ship?) I am with another person—don’t know who; Carolyn maybe?—and I believe I am eating an apple. The other person points up towards a wall above us, which surrounds the garden. “Look!” There is a man crouching behind the wall, and I can make out a handgun he is pointing at us. We flee. Although I am fearful for my life, I am not surprised. I am, after all, a spy, and this is part of the life of a spy, right?

As we run, I say to the other, “I’ve left my wallet back there. Have you got any money?” “No,” is the answer. I wonder how we’re going to get by, and how we’ll pay for food.

The scene shifts again to a restaurant, within the hotel (or ship). I see the man who had the gun sitting at a table with another woman (his wife?) and someone I know to be my spy colleague—a woman. When she sees me hiding behind the pillar she excuses herself from the table.

We end up in my hotel room, where she hands me my wallet. She tells me she left the table at the restaurant to go to the bench and get it for me.

Annotation

Carolyn B.—a friend from high school who played in orchestra with me. She is now a professor of music composition at a university in Southern California. My only knowledge of any connection she may have to boats is that our high school orchestra director once took several of us out on his sailboat.

The Sunken Garden—looked a lot like the one at the Honolulu Airport, where we were recently.