The dream was a nightmare.
I don't have nightmares
often, but when I do, the worst ones are the ones I call "trapped in the
dream" nightmares. They are a sort of lucid dreaming, I suppose, where I
become aware that I'm dreaming, inside my dream, but then I am unable
to wake up, despite wanting to or trying to.
This nightmare was exceptional in that not only was it
this sort of dream, but that it was "nested." There was sleeping and
dreaming within the dream, and then I was trapped in that dream and then
I woke up into another dream that I became aware was a dream and tried
to wake up from in turn. It was like the movie Inception, except I
didn't like that movie very much, although my dislike of it was more in
that it elided over the philosophically interesting parts in favor of
incoherent violence. So perhaps the philosophically interesting part got
embedded in my brain anyway, to express itself later in this nightmare.
In the dream, I was camping and hiking with my friend Bob along with a group of my current elementary students.
The area we were hiking through resembled northern Minnesota at first, but as the sun ramped down in the sky, the children were complaining and the land began to look desolate and empty, full of rocks and spindly trees. Everything became brown and gray. We came to a stream that was clogged with algae and autumnal-looking swamp grass at the bottom of a slight incline, and Bob proposed setting up camp.
As we set up camp, the children discovered a skeleton. And, then, another. Soon we realized the entire area was littered with the bones and skeletons of humans and animals, but the sun was setting, so we couldn't really move camp at this point. We made a fire and cooked something bad tasting. Some of the children complained but several were having swordfights with femurs.
I stared around at a desolate plain of bones.
Finally it was late at night and the moon was full. I found a place to put my tent but the air was warm, so I decided to sleep outside. I lay down and fell quickly asleep. It's always very strange to fall asleep in a dream. But it's much stranger to then be inside a dream inside that dream, and thinking, "I'm dreaming."
I couldn't wake up. I had this notion that the stream had risen while I slept, and I needed to wake up. I felt like I was lying in water. I couldn't wake up. I struggled, trying to move a muscle or twitch or blink, trying to wake up. I couldn't. I could feel the water rising.
Then bang, I was awake. My eyes popped open, and I knew instantly I was in another "layer" of my dream. I was in my apartment, but there was water raining down from the apartment above me, through the ceiling. It was logical enough – I'd been dreaming I was wet by the stream because of the water flooding into my apartment. I got up and realized that several Korean workmen had already entered my apartment to try to figure out what to do about the leak, but the were utterly ignoring me. It didn't strike me as odd they'd entered my apartment while I slept, but I was disturbed that they weren't talking to me.
"Am I a ghost?" I pondered. "Or just an ignorable foreigner?" I tried to move some of my possessions, that were getting wet from the flood. They were heavy, and the water was everywhere. Then I noticed a doorway, with an open door, in one wall of apartment. "Now where did that come from?" I wondered.
I went through the doorway to find a closed, musty room, full of junk. Like my father's living room – it smelled of too many books and the arid, oppressive atmosphere of Los Angeles in late summer. But it was dry, I reasoned. So I'll move my things in here, away from the flood.
I started to carry things but everything was very heavy. The workmen, after bashing a hole in another wall and my ceiling, had mostly staunched the flow of water but everything was damp and there was trash and rubble everywhere. They were crouched around a portable gas stove in the center of my apartment's floor cooking ramen and doing shots of soju and yelling at one another cordially. They continued to ignore me, and I felt very conscious that I was somehow "broken."
So I went into the musty room and lay down on my damp bedding which I'd unfurled onto the floor, and fell asleep. "This time, I can wake up for real," I said to myself, reassuringly.
But I couldn't wake up. I pushed against the cobwebs of sleep and couldn't push through. I clawed and cried out and spun my head on the pillow.
"Can't. Wake. Up." It was the sort of nightmare where you just know you're screaming, or moaning, or moving around.
Finally, I awoke. I'd planted my face against the heating cabinet – had I hit myself on it?
It was morning and my apartment was bright. I have to go to work early today – it's Saturday. Full schedule.
What I'm listening to right now.
Trauma Pet, "1."