I’m not sure why I’ve been waking up in the middle of the night (or really early in the morning) a lot in the past few months. While I was still in my library job, I would wake up and stress out about work. Now, I just wake up–either startled by a weird dream or not–and just be awake for a bit. I don’t have a huge problem falling back asleep usually, so if it’s 1, 2, or 3 in the morning, I just go back to sleep. If I wake up at 5 like this morning, though, I sometimes go back to sleep for another hour or so and other times just stay up. I wish I had you to cuddle with when I wake up in the middle of the night. You were always so reassuring a presence, so soft and so comforting. I could pull you close without worrying about disturbing you because although of course I would wake you up, you never seemed to mind and could go back to sleep immediately unlike if I try to spoon Mr. Frog sometimes.
This morning, I woke up from a very strange dream about a smart house and the occult. My dreams often seem to focus on places and people I’ve never met, as this one did, almost as if they’re movies about other people. Sometimes I’m the first-person point of view camera-perspective protagonist, but sometimes my perspective is just like a movie camera in third-person point of view watching other characters and places. My experience of dreams is usually governed by an overarching feeling that may or may not match the manifest content of the dream (and too often that overarching feeling is one of anxiety or uneasiness). And my dreams are often very architectural in quality, focusing on buildings and other spaces in a very deep way (emotionally and otherwise).
This particular dream from which I woke in a bit of a startled mood was about a house that my dream self owned, a large mansion-type house connected directly to a museum type space. The museum didn’t seem to be quite an art museum or a science museum but possibly something in between, like a design and technology one. In any case, it was night time, and I wanted to get into the house, but the power was out (and it was raining outside as well–pathetic fallacy all around!). The museum was open, though, and fully powered. I went through the lower level entrance of the house into a dark hallway. You would think a smart house would have back up generators or something. And here’s where the creepy occult stuff comes in…. The previous owner apparently had been into the occult and had a room in the lower level that was all white with skulls everywhere. I walked by it in the dream and deliberately tried to avoid looking in (of course all the lights worked in that room).
After awhile fiddling around in the dark hallway trying to get in through the security keypad (I didn’t know the pass code), I went into the museum and up a staircase to another entrance into the house. I had the same issue there, of course, because it was dark in the hallway, and I still did not know the pass code for the keypad. During these scenes, at some point I’m also inside the house in some very solidly realized rooms, and there is a creepy feeling throughout. There wasn’t anything particular smart about the rooms I experienced, but that was just one thing I knew about the house in the dram–that it was wired up with all sorts of technology and gadgets and had its own personality. I ended the dream back in the museum, where there are plenty of people still looking at exhibits.
It may be unsurprising that I thought about studying dreams as a researchers when I was in college–in a brief semester when I considered majoring in psychology.
Picture from December 12, 2013.
