Wednesday, 1/17

Okay...I get it, I get it. The dreams can stop now!

Twice in the past few days I’ve had the exact same dream—I’m rollerblading down Lincoln Street hill in Marquette, I’m dodging sticks and rocks in the road, doing my best not to fall down and wondering how I’m gonna through the roundabout onto Wright Street when Lincoln Street ends.

And then I wake up.

It’s not the most fun dream I’ve had recently; in fact, it doesn’t even come close to the one where I was Katy Perry’s besieged road manager (and let me ask you this—what other guy would have a dream about Katy Perry and have it deal with being her road manager? Geesh..). But I think the strangest thing about the dream is that I’ve had it twice. Once, I can see. Once, and I’m guessing my subconscious is telling me I have control issues I haven’t dealt with. But twice, and almost the exact same dream?

I like my brain. Really, I do.

The second time I had the dream was even stranger than the first, in that while I was rocketing down Lincoln Street and dodging the rocks & the sticks, something in the back of my brain was telling me that it was a dream, and that I’d gone through this before. I was actually able to wake myself up before getting to the Wright Street intersection and causing myself, at least in my dreams, great bodily harm. So now I’m thinking that if I have the dream a third time, I’ll just stop it before I even start rocketing down Lincoln Street.

Take that, control issues!!

I notice that as I’ve gotten older, my dreams have turned less freaky. Oh, like you, I still have the occasional bouts of highly symbolic journeys to lands into which even Sigmund Freud would be afraid to venture. But I don’t seem to have those stereotypical running- down-the-street-naked or watching-while-aliens blast-the-world-apart double features any more. My dreams have become, perhaps a bit sadly, a little more literal and a little easier to understand. I don’t know if that’s because I now know myself better or just because (heaven forbid) I’ve become a little more mature, but my dreams have slowly become more sedate.

And that’s probably why the rollerblading dream, occurring twice in the span of four nights, caught my attention. It was a little out of the ordinary, even for me. Of course, it wasn’t as out of the ordinary as dreaming that I was Katy Perry’s besieged road manager, but I have the sad feeling that’s a whole OTHER can of subconscious worms, a can that I may not want to open just yet.

8-)

(jim@wmqt.com)

(ps—I've been getting some rather interesting thoughts from several of you about yesterday's blog, the “what if” about U.P. history. Keep 'em coming; I'll write about a few of them tomorrow!)