amphichon

Like many people, I often dream vividly of strange situations. But while some people’s dreams are populated with the images or sights or sounds of those situations, and sometimes mine are too, the most common features of my dreams are extended conversations. Often the conversations are incidental to the other events, but in some of my dreams the conversation is really the only thing that happens. (Sometimes I wonder if this is another one of subtle nudges from fate that I should get busy writing more – that I dream in language.) At times I manage to bring parts of that conversation with me as I wake up, and some of those stranded bits of dialogue have formed the basis for stories; other times, the whole discussion is lost to me, and I’m left only with the recollection of having had an enjoyable (if sometimes strange) conversation.

The parts toward the end of these conversational dreams of mine, that are freshest in my mind when I wake up, are the most disconnected and strange. I have a theory about this though. It’s not just the end of the dream that is disconnected and strange – I think the entire dream is knit of the same delicate skein of solid-seeming nonsense, but as we are fully immersed in it for most of the dream, it doesn’t seem as bizarre. Only the last bits which are fresh in our minds as we wake up are clearly irrational, because while they were born in the irrational dream, they are still clearly visible to our rational awake mind. The rest of the dream concepts aren’t fresh enough for us to fully retain as we wake up, only fragments remain here and there in our short-term memory, so our rational mind imposes an arbitrary logic to those fragments which makes the rest of the dream seem less irrational than the bits at the very end. I don’t think our dream dissolves into incomprehensibility as we near waking – I think the entire dream is just as impossible to understand rationally as the end, it’s all of a piece and irrational throughout, even though it makes perfect sense to us while we are in it.

This is the kind of thought that makes me wonder how fragile sanity really is. Every night, many of us – maybe most of us – are in some sense insane. Our ability to rationally process information in our heads is suspended, and dream logic prevails. How easy would it be for some small switch to get stuck somewhere, and make it so that this disconnected dream logic follows us into the waking world? Or for the shreds of memory and the random firing of synapses that create dream worlds to begin to plague us while awake? As powerful as dreams can be, it sometimes surprises me that more of us don’t have trouble distinguishing them from reality.

But I digress. The reason I brought this up was only to record the last snatch of conversation in my dream just now. Briefly, this dream centered around a dinner party. See, I frequently walked down a certain street (in the history of this dream), a street that had a row of restaurants and cafes which offered outdoor seating, and I would commonly pick one or another of them for a meal al fresco, but there was a certain cafe that only seemed to have one table, a small booth beneath an awning right outside the cafe’s front door. Other restaurants were on either side of this cafe and they both had an abundance of tables surrounding this one, but it was clear that only the one table belonged to this cafe. I had been to the restaurants on either side and had a mind to visit the cafe, but the problem was that every time I went by, there was a woman in a green dress who was dining alone at that table.

So one day (the day of my dream) I stood a ways off and watched this woman at dinner, and when it seemed clear that her meal was finished and her table was cleared, and the woman stood and went inside, I walked over and had a seat. Almost immediately a waiter came by and cheerfully took my order, and shortly thereafter the woman came back out of the cafe, walked over to the table, and had a seat across from me. The waiter came back and took her order as well, and then we began talking as we waited for our food. It seemed that this woman didn’t really ever do anything besides sit at this table and eat – for every hour the cafe was open, rain or shine, she could be found there (apart from the occasional break). However she didn’t mind if others wanted to use the table as well – she simply joined them for a meal. She seemed pleasant enough company so we talked genially, and once the food arrived, our server had a seat and joined our conversation, and shortly thereafter the busboy and the bartender and the manager did too, so that we had to pull the table away from the cafe wall and add a few more chairs, and eventually we had quite a good-sized dinner party.

The conversation at this dinner was rich and varied, from books we’d been reading to current events, to the woman’s green dress and my own green hat, a floppy fisherman’s hat that I happened to be wearing at the time, and how they appeared to be nearly the same shade (forest green). At one point I got up to use the restroom, and got back to find the woman in my seat, but it was only because she wanted to see how things looked from that perspective, and so I took the seat she’d vacated and we continued. Unfortunately reality began to intrude near the end, interrupting our conversation, but I retained this random line as one of the last things the woman said to me before I woke up:

I hope you can make out the rondel I am singing in this next bit, as I really would like to understand it better myself.

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