Dreams

Dec 16 2020

Last night I dreamt a long vivid dream. At one point we (me and a woman) got into an elevator in a house somewhere. It was a rickety elevator, 70s style, smelled like it too (I don't mean piss or anyhting, just the particular smell of an old elevator) and it had these particular round plastic buttons you had to push in deep. All the more surprise that the numbers went pretty high and for some reason we had to go to 69. But then, with a lurch, it started moving horizontally. I could look outside, and first it looked like an abandoned theme park. Like you would emerge from a closed ride, the wooden walls with peeling paint opening up around you, us going higher and higher, a slow rise. Then it opened into a hilltop snowy landscape with People and skiing stuff, in perfect sunshine, but static. Our viewpoint was higher, further away from the scene. The pleasure of all this combined with another beautiful emotion: the woman besides me turned out to be an ex girlfriend of mine from almost two decades ago, just like she was then. Me touching her soft blond short hair, she turning towards me. Exhilarating, just like it was back then, almost flying. In the dream it didn't feel like nostalgia, more like timelessness. Like I was still that person.

I read somewhere that dreams of confined water (swimming pool, a flooded town etc) describe a juxtaposition of natural powers vs. the human power of order. Elevators could be something similar: flying, but still in a confined space.

The dream did not start like "being in love", although it ended in that emotion, in its most personal sense. And the flying part had many less pleasant undercurrents, not just exhilaration. But that's the hardest thing to bring across when describing your dreams: the emotional currents. Maybe that's why I like Bongwater so much.