Me Dreaming

Some people (the unlucky ones) already know that I can remember most of my dreams. I don’t share them with people often, because telling stories like that puts people to sleep. That’s what this blog is for. Let’s get started.

Getting bogged down in the details of this story would not add much to the experience, so this is going to sound like a Cliff’s Notes summary. I’m not worried about that, however. I picked this dream to prattle on about because it highlights a few common (but not universal) themes of my dreams that I have come to realize are unusual. I’ll give a list of what I think they are at the end.

I began in the role of casual leader of a group of roughly one hundred frontier settlers. It was present time, but the frontier in question was far away from civilization, so many high tech items were irrelevant. (No internet, but plenty of hand and power tools.) For unstated reasons, the dream opened with the decision already made to begin a colony on the green plains at which the colony had just arrived. Construction on several small buildings began, and was completed quickly.

One of the settlers founds a lead plate in the countryside that clearly resembled a crude, yet ornate and symmetrical face. The face was shaped with the expression of a mild, but disapproving frown. The size of the plate was an oval roughly the size of a microwave oven. With my approval, the plate was taken to be of cultural significance and was bolted to the landing of my house/the town hall in a place of minor significance. (It was knee high, facing the countryside. In other words, it was treated as a novelty, not used as some sort of town crest.)

The colony continued to develop, but before long, the plate began to speak to people. It spoke to only a few people at first, and without saying much of importance. The plate was rumored by those who had heard it to have the personality of a bored, condemning old man. Before long, the plate spoke to me as well. The description seemed accurate. The face was mildly philosophical, but trended towards disapproving of minor decisions made by colonists without offering better options of its own.

As time passed, the plate became more vocal, and more disapproving. About the time when it had spoken to everyone in the colony, it began exercising an ability to appear to people in waking visions. Still, it did nothing but act as an increasingly vocal critic of minor choices.

Soon, however, its tone darkened. As it grew more and more disdainful of the colony and my leadership thereof, people who ignored it began to simply disappear. The plate took casual credit for the disappearances, but showed no remorse. It insisted that removing the people was, in fact, in the best interest of the colony. As people disappeared in increasing numbers, I ordered the plate be pried from the landing and destroyed.

Attempts to remove the plate failed. In fact, in response to the attempts, it grew and became a solid sheet of lead covering the entire face of the landing. Attempts to attack/destroy the plate resulted in nothing but bemused, contemptuous insults from the face itself. Curiously, it made no attempt to eliminate people attempting to attack or remove it, seemingly preferring to mock them instead.

Finally, only about twenty colonists, including myself remained. The plate was growing more and more critical of me in the role of leader, and appeared to me in visions often. Its tone was conversational, but the threat of my imminent disappearance was implied.

In the eleventh hour, an unusual solution occurred to me. In my spare time, I had been working on a lead sculpture, also in the form of a lead plate. It was not a face, but rather a type of ornate crest, whimsically, but not officially thought of as a possible town faceplate. I had only worked on it in exceptionally good moods, and the thing had become a sort of monument to happiness in my mind.

The condescending face appeared to me and declared that it was considering the colony to be a failure. I ordered two of my men to bring welding tools to the landing. I marched purposely to my back room, picked up my good-will town crest, and heaved it with me to the front landing. I descended and marched to the face. As it opened its mouth to taunt me, I slammed the flat back of my crest over its face. It completely obscured the persona beneath it. Soon, my men arrived with the welding tools. I carefully fused the lead of my sculpture with the lead of the face, melting my sculpture into it, in sections, from the top down. The process completely destroyed my work as I went, leaving only the random, mounded, twisted lead blotches cut by the hot tools.

When I was finished, no sound came from the pot-marked metal. The fields around us were calm and quiet. The visions had stopped. It seemed self-apparent that the good feelings I had imbued into the crest had, in fusing, destroyed the dark unhappiness of the heathen plate.

I then woke up before my alarm went off.

I think you can begin to see why I picked this dream to type up. But as promised, here’s that list of what I consider to be unusual.

List of highlighted traits that seem common only in my dreams:
--Sensical plot arc. Characters disappeared, but in fitting with the story. No new ones appeared without reason. “Mickey Mouse” did not have a cameo.
--A developed pragmatic sense of purpose. There was a problem, it was getting worse, so an unexpected solution was developed and executed. If we accept that this dream seems to fall solidly in the fantasy genre, the method of dealing with said problem was surprisingly similar to what would be done in real life (by me).
--A complete lack of people I know or have seen in the waking world. (Though I have to admit, I was tempted to pretend that I had a few concubines, just so I could annoy people by using the “Tag people in this Note!” feature on Facebook.)
--Vivid, bright, contrasting colors. People who think that the only pretty days are described as “sunny” will not follow this line of thought. But my dreams feature bright colors highlighted by equally dark shadows. That face had beautiful, dark black creases, even as it was lit outdoors on bright days.
--Helpful insight into my waking life. In this case, one belief I hold is that many people create their own unhappiness simply by insisting that they are unhappy in all ambiguous situations. My previous strategy was to avoid and/or attempt to cheer those people. Now I realize that soldering a “happy” lead plate to their faces would be much faster and more effective.