Really unsettling dream, any thoughts on the state of my mind?

[redwitch]

Fri Nov-25-05 12:29 PM
Original message
Please someone interpret this for me. One extremely wierd dream!

I just woke up and told it to my husband before I lost it completely. I won't tell you all the dream in it's amazing detail but here's the reader's digest version:

It starts with me in a store with an old customer, one I haven't called on in years. She sells lots of sewing machine stuff- why I would be calling on her I have no idea, I don't sell sewing machine stuff, I sell jewelry ( in my waking life). I begin to talk to her as I am opening some mail I have recieved and find that is seriously threatening me to pay up or else, that I have owed this company money for years, yada, yada. I look at the envelopes and they are addressed to someone with my first name, and one of the people lives on a street with the same name that I once lived on - but in a different state. Clearly, they have the wrong person. So I get on the phone with them complaining to this old customer while I am doing it. Finally I hang up and say goodbye and leave, thinking I will deal with it further when I reach home.

As I am leaving the store i notice a garage like wing of the building filled with antiques. Aha, I think, that's why I used to stop here. As I am brousing I see the world's biggest wooden train station waiting room type bench. Enormous, really beautiful. So I ask the man who is in the shop about it. He says it's from the old Woodstock train station at the farm and it is 150,000 dollars because it is historic. I tell him my brother might want it for his bar! and he gives me paperwork to show him, also gives me a key. As he is walking me out to my car we notice an injured young man with bandaged head coming out of a VFW hall. The man greets him as do I . I shake his hand and start to cry, I ask "How are you?" And he replies that he'll get by but doesn't want to discuss it. As I leave him I say to the store owner "God, I hate this fucking war!" He starts to scream at me and we have this hugh! argument whereupon I fling his paperwork at him and end with "FUCK YOU!" I stomp away to go to my car and realize the whole scene has changed. I do not know where my car is.

I am walking the streets of the most godawful run down Catskill resort type town and it is so seedy. Old amusement parks abound, all the rides need serious renovation and are covered in flaking paint. There are school groups jostling me on the sidewalk, I am SO lost.

As I enter a covered walkway I suddenly realize it is a ride in full operation and I don't know how to get out. Suddenly I hear a woman yelling at me that I am where I do not belong, I should leave now. She is really pissed at me. I tell her I am so sorry, I'm lost, she just keeps yelling and then says she just came from a funeral of a soldier and she is angry about that, doesn't need to deal with stupid me just now. I tell her about the young man I just met and that I hate the war. She does too. She then points me toward a hallway filled with doors and tells me to go that way. I am uncertain and hesitate when suddenly the place is filled with young women in linen dresses and white bonnets. They say they will help me and want to talk to me. There are lots of young girls with them also dressed in the same manner.

I figure out from the garb tht they are church group and I soon find out they are "The New Covenent" aha, I think, a cult, I had better get away. They don't want me to go, but finally one woman says she will help me find my car and we leave, she brings a 12 or so year old girl with her and a baby. We find the car and I offer to give her a ride to where they are going. I am driving now and she says she knows a shortcut to the house she is going to. I am now driving with her on dark backroads and she says turn here. We go into a tunnel and as we approach light again I realize the road is slippery, there are no guardrails, it is steep and twisting, and below us is a lake. I lose control of the car which slides off the road and drops into the lake.

The girl, the woman and I are now swimming in the lake. We then make it to the side and climb up, I watch my car sink until it is gone. Oh no I am thinking, my samples were in the car, I have no phone, we're in the middle of nowhere. She has a phone though and I call the police. The woman and girl leave me there to wait. I realize I am still holding the key from the antique store.

When the cops come they are really nice, laughing at me, but nice. I hear one on the phone to a tow truck driver saying it was a 200 mile drive for him to get to the car. Gonna be a long wait. So I'm hanging out with the cops smoking pin striped! cigarettes and finally make the call to hubby to tell him my news. I start with "Im OK but I just drove the car into a lake" when I realize the baby is still in the car.

That's when I woke up with a start. Thank God it was only a dream. It was very upsetting.
No wonder I don't sleep!

[BlueIris]

1. Well, off the top of my head:

About your state of mind--it's obviously filled with a lot of anxiety and pain about the war and all of the people suffering because of it, (the wounded soldier, the dead soldier, the woman angry about the soldier's funeral) including those whose rationality and integrity are warped by supporting it (the store owner). In my reading, it also seems that you have a great deal of concern about what the repressive, regressive rightward social shift in America (which has created the war) is doing to our female population (as reflected in the presence of the "cult" controlled women wearing clothing reminiscent of the 19th century).

I am also seeing evidence of conflicted feelings, possibly guilt-ridden ones, about the role your connection to material things, especially those you need to survive, plays in your life, despite what I think you sense about the negative effect that extreme obsessions with materialism have had on our government and society (the worst result of these effects being the greed that fuels the war). For instance, after your argument with the store owner about the war, you lose your car. You hate what it represents enough to separate yourself from it, but you still need it to function while you try to get away from the place you've gotten lost in. Even after you find yourself wandering in a town that may have once been commercially successful and prosperous but is now bleak and "seedy," and you have the run in with the cult, you still need your car and all the things in it. I also pick up on some frustration with your sense that even our sentiments and ideals, even the ones that should be most valuable to us as people who oppose the war, have been perverted by materialism--so much so that literally everything, especially intangibilities, are tied to material things (the bench, reminiscent of the rebellion of the Woodstock days, which your dream self wants to give to your brother for his bar, which is actually an antique, the way genuine rebellion seems antiquated to this world, and has an absurdly high price tag).

The end of your dream provides the best example about your deep fears over the material dependencies you resent, but which our world makes us tolerate in order to function--your car sinks, this incapacitates you, and the car, and everything in it is the first thing you tell your husband about, despite the other experiences you had and the fact that along with the car, sank the baby (representing the highest toll these social problems take--the souls and future lives of our children and theirs). The presence of antiques in connection to the symbols of materialism is interesting, too--your mind's recognition of the deep roots these problems have in our history perhaps? A longing for an antiquated, more innocent, past in which you felt less guilt about the impact of materialism on your life? I think it's curious that the war-supporting antique store guy gives you a key, and at the end of your dream, though you are still holding it, it is apparently useless, meaningless or indecipherable to you--as it appears to have been to him. I actually think the key is your dream's figurative clue to you that your dream has major signficance, a serious message to communicate--and since it's the key to the antique store, this message centers on issues about the negative side of our material world. It sticks out to me that the store owner (who perhaps should have been most concerned about this problem) didn't seem to know what to do with the key so he gave it to you, and though you might have been able to figure it out what it was for at the beginning of the dream, by the end of your ordeal, what you have been through appears to have stripped you of this ability.

I also see your clear feelings of helplessness about how to create positive changes that can help stop the war and repair the damages done to our world by it. Some people in the dream are away of this negativity and carnage but do nothing to stop it, (antique store owner) others share your views but seem as helpless as you feel, (the woman who had been to the soldier's funeral) and lots more seem totally clueless about everything (the women of the "New Covenant"). Even the police, representative of a government you should be able to rely on for support, are worthless to you in this dream, even mocking your predicament.

That really does sound like a yucky dream, now that I'm re-reading my post. Very depressing. Feel better!

[redwitch]

2. interesting

thanks for your thoughts on the wierdest dream I have ever had.

I should mention that the police were actually very nice, they were teasing to make me laugh it seemed to me. They were also concerned that I had been with the cult women, one cop told me they were very bad and I should stay away from them.
The car filled with my samples = my livelihood, as a road rep I couldn't work w/o car or samples.
It really was a most unsettling dream, but I am glad I wrote it down here immediately upon waking or it would be gone totally now.


Do you know if melatonin produces vivid dreams? I took some last night for the first time.

[NJCher]

3. yes, it does!

My husband took it and had some very vivid dreams. Usually he doesn't remember them at all but he did when he started taking it.

BlueIris, I enjoyed reading your dream analysis. I was going to tackle it but I think you've got it.




Cher

[redwitch]

4. hmmm, Not sure I should take it again in that case

On the other hand, I might have a really wonderful vivid dream the next time. I just need to start sleeping better at night so badly I am willing to try most anything at this point.

[NJCher]

5. here's a link about melatonin and dreams

http://www.geocities.com/richard_holmes/esoteric/melatonin.htm

I'd give it some thought--people actually take this to increase the vividness of their dreams!




Cher

[redwitch]

6. thanks Cher, Interesting read

Now I don't know what to do. I am having some decent sleep for the first time in quite a while. That may also be due to my having a long much needed vacation at this time of year( I'm a sales rep and things are pretty much done for the year). So I am relaxed and home much of the time from Thanksgiing through new Year's. My recent bout of good sleep may be due to that or the melatonin. The vivid dreams I am having I must attribute to the melatonin. But if it may not be healthy I will stop taking it. Darn. The vivid dreams are pretty amazing though.

[MissWaverly]

7. I also had a disturbing dream 2 weeks ago

Could these be partial memories of time before, that's what my dream
was like, it was like from the forties, and I went through all this
strife with the war and all but I wasn't around back then, maybe
the same thing happened to you, that would explain the woman explaining that you don't belong, and you getting into a huge argument, especially since there may be those from back then who
have not yet resolved their issues and you would never agree because
you have a totally different experience. I sometimes think that what
happens is that we observe in these dreams, we feel but actions flows
around us and we are not choosing the experiences.