After just two hours of sleep, I wake from dreaming, not a frightening nightmare, but a scenario that bothers me because I know its basis is somewhere in reality. Enhanced by magical realism, where a three story building becomes so many more floors of space–there are three or four third floors alone.
I fell to sleep thinking of a story I am working on and woke up to a more interesting and evocative one of the subconscious mind, one I wish I could have written, nd it is strangely telling. The plot is simple: I am on campus, note the time and get up from where I’m seated in the courtyard reading, enter the classroom to find that I’ve left my books behind on the table where I sat. I rush out, knowing at the most I’d be a couple minutes late and miss only that. But my journey backwards becomes complicated as the buildings change and all the stairways lead to places I have never been before. Soon, I am hopelessly lost and somewhere have as well lost sight of my original goal–to retrieve my books–and instead, am searching for the classroom where I’ve left my pocketbook to show that I indeed, had been there but had left.
With only five minutes before the class is due to end, I find my way and enter as the students are being handed back a prior assignment that has been graded. As the room empties, the professor comes over and asks me where I’ve been. I answer him that I was here and left and lost my way back.
And then I am awake.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology
You’ve described a dream I’ve had in many variations over the years. They are exhausting. They only stopped with such frequency after I began writing seriously again.
L touches on the power of writing for the writer because writing isn’t really what’s going on. I would imagine such are dreams too. Not really what they are or what is.
The scenario of the endlessly growing building is a common one of my more vivid dreams. I believe that the subconscious creates the symbols, and a series of like or recurring symbols become evident. In my attempts of analyzing, the space appears to represent an attempt to regain something lost from the past. This suits this particular dream as well as several others I remember. Among the crowd of people are those from reality that pertain to the quest, which helps me to associate it to the particular conscious stress point.