These Dreams (Go On When I Close My Eyes)

Stop the presses! For the first time in her life, Sophia fell asleep while watching Baby Einstein. (The Beethoven one -- all music, no talking.) Poor kid was wiped out from a morning at LLL playing with another girl, and then an hour at the park. Now she's all squished onto the sofa. Hee.

So, um, sometimes I have these dreams. Not very often -- maybe once a year, sometimes even less -- but they're not like my other dreams (which may involve such disparate and unappetizing topics as Steve Gutenberg getting a boner, and waking up one morning to discover I have glitter-encrusted teeth). No, these dreams have a hyper-real quality to them; colors are super-saturated, actions are experienced as they are in real life -- not as though from a movie camera, but confusing, blurring, difficult to parse in the moment. The dreams lack the wending storyline of an ordinary dream, coming in snatches and jump cuts as quick as the most attention-span-frying television show.

Sometimes they're okay and sometimes they're horrifying, but they always are linked with tremendous pulses of emotion. And always, always, they bring a message. Sometimes they foretell. Sometimes they bring me current news that I have no way of knowing. But there's always truth inside them.

Here's an example: the first one I ever had, I dreamed about what would later turn out to be my first kiss. I saw a flash of a church and stained glass windows, blue sky above -- but from the perspective of straight upwards along the sheer wall, looking right at the sky. I saw (in a jump cut) storm clouds, and a tornado. I felt that jittery stomach I got around certain boys. And that was it.

So months later, I am spending a fair amount of time in a youth group setting with a certain boy (oh, he has a website, and y'all would get a kick out of it if I put his name in. I will NOT.). We both end up teaching kids' classes in Bible School that summer. One day, before the big final program, we decided to take a walk around the outside of the church. There were woods behind, and fields, but we walked around to the front -- I'd never been there -- near the edge of the road. He suggested we go look at the stained glass windows, and we ended up lying on our backs in the grass with our feet up on the wall, looking up at the sky. My brain just about shorted out when I felt the dream-world snap into place with the real world.

After we'd gotten the kids through the song about how the Lord said to Noah there was gonna be a floody floody, we noticed the clouds gathering. Soon the tornado sirens went off, and everyone was herded down to the basement. Boy convinced me to disappear with him into a Sunday school classroom, where, after much hemming and hawing and jittery stomach on my part, I experienced my first kiss.

Everything from the dream was in the experience -- but the dream was not the entirety of the experience. Written out like this it loses impact, because the most important feature of the dreams is the feel of them. They feel exactly like a memory breaking through -- the kind you don't necessarily want to remember. The emotions are intense -- elation, terror, profound unease. Certain details appear, others are left out. I've had regular intense dreams before, but these just don't even compare.

(Oh, and I'm kind of realizing as I write, and please do not laugh, that based on my one viewing of the show Medium, this is almost exactly the way it happens for that nice Patricia Arquette and her, you know, psychic screenwriters.)

What I want to know is: Do you have dreams like this? Crazy ones that come true? Flashes when you're awake? What is UP with that?

Comments

[Erin]

eee first comment. i've been lurking for a while after reading ALL of your archives. in a non e-stalkerish way of course.

i dont konw what is up with that, but yes i do have them. without being all 0o0o0 spooky, i totally dreamt (dreamed?) my father died before he did, but the dream didnt make sense to me until i found out he had died.

i've had a couple others as well, not about such huge life events, but i dreamed of my current fiancee and what he looked like before i met him too (he actually looked bummy, and was wearing ugly pants and was a musician and when i woke up from my dream i was all "i'm NEVER hooking up with someone like that"). yeah so.

strange. what IS up with that?

[Erin]

PS: Patricia Arquette actually makes me want to self harm. i dont love her. at all.

[stephanie]

I once had such a compelling dream of being pregnant and delivering a baby girl that when I woke up I bought a pregnancy test. Positive. A girl. I have PCOS and endo. and I had never been pregnant before or had a dream of being pregnant before. I also hadn't had the vaguest hint of a conscious suspicion that I was pregnant, so yeah, I've had dreams like that.

[Dawn]

Oh yeah. I had a totally compelling dream a little over a year ago that I was in a car accident and broke my right leg. I tried to blow it off because heck, I'd never broken a bone or been in an accident in my life.

Last April I was in a car accident and shattered my right heel. Watching the other car come toward me in that moment was so freaky, knowing my premonition (?) was coming true.

I get deja vu all the time when I'm awake too, like I've been in that particular moment before. Creepy.

[Jo]

Oooh Dawn, you just reminded me that I've had premonitions for the last two car accidents I was in! One was my fault, one was caused by another driver, but both had this aura building up to them.

[Tine]

Right here. My freakiest premonitions-come-true are usually about babies. I've predicted more than one pregnancy, gender of kid...even got a name right, and I hadn't talked to the couple (or anyone close to them) AT ALL about that topic. I don't even know them very well. Weird.

And yeah, I get that deja vu in real life thing, too. I figure when that happens, the original experience was probably one of those freaky dreams -- one I can't remember.

[Misti]

YES! OMFG YES!!

I've been having these since I was a kid! If you figure out what these are, email me dude!

[Kateri]

ahh, yes. i've had some of these, coming and going my whole life. when i was a teenager, i had one about a death camp that left me shaken for weeks afterwards.

lately, to my dismay, they all seem to concern a Certain Unavailable Someone. pshaw.

[Bella]

Yes. Completely. Very strange. And I'm a psychologist and have no idea why we don't study this shit more. Well, I have some idea why we don't, but these are the moments that I think I am studying the wrong thing and this is SO MUCH MORE interesting, cool, right, good, etc. to think through and work on...

[Rosemary Grace]

Yes yes yes, I do. The first one was when I was 5, and the reality didn't come until I was seven.

[SarcastiCarrie]

I've only had premonition dreams twice, but the first time, as it was coming true, I freaked out, threw my stuff on the ground and RAN home. Poor dude with the clip board who had been in the dream probably thought I was nuts when he asked if I wanted to take a survey (but in the dream, it felt like foreboding, so of course, I thought he was NO GOOD).

[Mandy]

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.

Often they were for mundane, pretty unimportant things. Many times I swept them aside. Most were like flashes such as you described...not the whole event, not all of the details, but more than enough to recognize it when it began to happen for real.

Over time (and with an openness, for lack of a better word) some of the dreams have gotten more specific and often the information comes without actually dreaming.

i had lots of flashes of my son, for example, before conceiving him...including a very scary picture that ultimately came true in the hospital when he was 12 days old and had pneumonia, but he was so little I thought he'd just been born.

[Jenn (dish)]

I have had these types of dreams on several occasions. Each time the dream is more odd and displaced than my usual dreams so it tends to stick with me after i wake. Then, when the pieces start to fall together (the event starts to happen in real life) it is so freaky.

[Noelle]

Oh yes, most definitely. I dream about the future all the time and when reality catches up, I get that deja vu feeling.

I've done a lot of reading on many spiritual topics and if you're a believer that you're creating your own universe, well, it makes that whole "dreaming about the future" thing far less creepy.

By far the creepiest thing I've had happen to me is a dream I had when I first started dating my ex. It was of a little boy... I saw that boy in flashes (while awake) many times over the last 5 years and when my ex and I split, I was terribly sad. I thought the little boy was his. When he got married and had a baby girl, I realized that the little boy is most likely mine. Only time will tell.

[gretchenosis]

I have my premonitions as flashes of knowledge when I'm awake. It's rare that I dream them. I'll be watching tv or something and then just *know* something. And with certain people, I can pick up my phone moments before they call. It's not that I'm going to call them, it's that I know they're calling.

[Lioness]

Never when I'm awake, but I do have the dreams. My mum and my oldest cousin (female) also do, must be a matrilinear thing. They're sometimes not very detailed, sometimes frighteningly so. The one that scared me the most happened when I lived in Israel, I dreamt of a bombing and it's not exactly a special thing when you live there but I dreamt of the bus number and place and time to the minute, and when I woke up in a cold sweat it turned out I was right.

What I do have awake is very good antennae, I'll look at someone and just know things abt their emotional make-up. Very disturbing when it's a boyfriend or girlfriend of a friend, bcs I'll know if it will work and why it will fail. I never tell unless my friends make me, and even then only after I'm sure they really do want to know. It's a shitty thing though, imagine meeting someone's girlfriend for the first time and turning to your girl friend who also met her and saying "She'll make him terribly unhappy, and it will go on for years." Girl friend, despite having seen my antennae never fail for over 2 decades, immediately accuses me of being hasty and harsh blabla. Well it's been 4 years, their relationship has been a misery from the beginning and they're now in the final stages of divorce. Sorry I wrote a treaty but yes, bit of a mixed blessing.

[Ariella]

It's interesting that you wrote this entry, because the timing is perfect. I recently went to a work function up in a posh little town around 2 hours from Madison. I had never been to the town before. While I was there, I experienced the most intense deja vu (which is what I call this phenomenon, even though it's not entirely correct) I've had in a long time.

For me, I may not even remember the dream directly, but when it comes to actually experiencing the thing I've dreamed about, I do remember it. I remember every little detail. I wonder if it means that I am living the life I'm supposed to live.

Now, unlike you, these little flashes don't always portend some big event. The one I experienced the other night had nothing of note attached to it in any way.

[Jo]

Oh, I just remembered an earlier instance! When I was in first grade I had this dream of a big, modern, wood-sided house. It was like nothing I'd ever seen before, and for some reason I was going to visit it. In third grade, I was at a new school and went home with a new friend -- to that very modern wood-sided house (that has no likeness in the Wichita metro area, and whose neighborhood I had never visited). It was SO BIZARRE.

Mixed blessing, Lioness, damn right.

[Annie]

I totally have those dreams! They're often very mundane--they're flashes of life, and they happen AND IT'S SO WEIRD.

[Jan]

YES.

I also have "waking" dreams..little flashes of conscience that preview something that usually happens within 2 weeks of the dream.

Oddly enough, the most vivid and accurate of these happen when I am ovulating.

[Susan]

OMG, I've TOTALLY had those pre-flashes! Sometimes a daydream, sometimes a night-dream, but them BAM, I'll barely remember it as the actual thing happens, and next thing you know I'm all HOLY CRAP, I totally DREAMED that already, and HERE IT IS, HAPPENING!! Wierd.

[beth]

Yes, I totally do. The very first one was about a Star Wars neck tie. My brother wanted to wear aforesaid neck tie to his 6th grade graduation and my mother said absolutely not, but he carried it in his pocket and wore it anyway. That was the dream. In reality he did not own this tie. A few months later I was shopping for his birthday gift and saw, right there in the geek store, the same Star Wars necktie I'd dreamed about. And I bought it, and he wore it at his 6th grade graduation. I have photographic evidence.

And...HAHAHAHA you had your first kiss in a Sunday school classroom!