The Things I Learn in Dreams

Well, here we are again and I must say that it's lovely to see you, white text-box. My, my, my, it seems that my time has run away with itself. I had hardly realised that it was as late as it was until I looked up at my clock just minutes ago and realised that if I didn't write something soon then... well, it's unlikely anybody would noticed really, except for myself and that's really the important thing.

Well, today I did pleasantly nothing. I took my dog for a walk, played a game and surfed the web. There's really not much to say about it, so I'll tell you about something that is, to me, far more exciting: Dreams.

I am loathed to tell anyone about dreams I have as I recognise that your dreams, perhaps by definition, are only really meaningful to yourself and therefore, usually, only interesting to yourself. Despite that, I had one of my recurring dreams last night in which I am walking down the street and circumstances arrange themselves to demonstrate that I have developed super powers. Either I'll get hit by a car and suffer no ill effects or I'll fall off a building only to find I can fly or I'll need to get somewhere quickly and I'll discover that I can run, jump and climb like an expert parkourist (this one is particularly common).

I imagine that this is a recurring dream for most people but where mine deviates is that I'll always have to deal with the real life consequences of super powers. The car that crumples around me still lets me feel the terrible jolt all the way through my body and afterwards, I have to relearn how to pick up objects without crushing them or how to negotiate environments quickly without smashing through walls. In my flying dreams, I have to work at flying, I have to think about wind direction, air currents and up drafts in addition to the wind hitting my face at over 80 miles per hour and that's not even to mention the difficulties of landing and taking off without smashing into something. And whenever I'm an amazing parkourist, I have to think about the movements and balance of my body, about whether or not I can make a jump or survive a fall.

In fact, last night I vividly remember learning that I could jump some 20 feet into the air (after discovering my powers jumping over an oncoming car) and damn near breaking my legs on every landing. I remember then learning how to bend my legs and land on all fours to evenly distribute the weight. I remember practising jumping and grabbing onto lamp-posts, climbing up them with ease and jumping off again. I remember scaling buildings, running along walls even jumping from car to moving car, each time learning a little more about how my powers worked, the limits of my abilities and how they could be overcome and the pure, mad exhilaration of being able to do what I was doing.

And then I woke up.

I always think these dreams are real when they happen, every time, and every time I wake up to be disappointed by the sad reality that even dragging my sorry self upright of a morning is a difficult task that requires all my concentration. On a slightly less depressing note, it makes me extremely angry that I should spend a night learning how to use my powers and then wake up to have them removed from me just as I was getting the hang of them.

In fact, now that I come to think about it, developing abstract skills seems to be a rather common theme in my dreams. I will frequently be involved in assassinations, wars, sword fights, wildernesses of one extreme or another, using ancient magic, psychic powers and the driving of various vehicles within my dreams, and in all these scenarios I have to learn how to do them on the fly, even if they are a repeat of another dream.

These dreams are always extremely vivid and and real. I can see clearly in my minds eye, me, with nothing but a katana, taking on an infinite stream of samurai. I can still feel the clash of sword on sword, the crunching of bones beneath the blade, the lopping off of limbs. I can still feel the lines of pain drawn across my body by their swords, lines that gushed blood and slowed my movements, clouded my mind with agony, but never quite deep enough to kill. I remember the feelings of frantic desperation mingled with grace and power that overcame me.

I can clearly see myself in an office building, hunting huge intelligent giraffe-like creatures with other soldiers. I can see myself barking and receiving orders while the screams of allies and opponents filled the air. I can remember the horrible click of an empty ammo cartridge as one creature knocked me to the ground. I remember begging him to kill me quick so that I could just come back, but not to leave me dying in pain. He said he'd let me suffer. So I rolled back and forth, desperately and frantically dodging his fore-legs which ended in swords before using my knife to cut at his legs and underbelly before stabbing some sort of land mine into his underbelly and proceeding to crawl away as fast as possible with broken legs, only dodging the explosion by hiding in the crater left by a mortar shell.

I can clearly see myself with the other survivors hunting through a town that we hoped would have food in. I remember entering a building that we had hoped was abandoned and boarding up a room to spend the night in. I remember being awakened (in my dream) to he sound of splintering wood and screaming for everyone to get up, that they had found us. I remember that they had grabbed the only female in our band and I remember dragging her away from clutching fingers before they could turn her into one of them. I remember the mad scrabble for guns, the desperate, frantic and bloody charge through the building, the sickening realisation that the only way out was through an upstairs window and out over the all too open fields. I remember the rotting flesh, the mad angry eyes and the hideous screams of the zombies.

I have flown spaceships, rode dragons, scaled mountains and fought beasts too dark to mention. And in each instance I have needed to learn a wildly new skill quickly and efficiently. Sometimes, I was rewarded with only the cold stab of death, of the sword piercing my heart, of a shotgun blast to the back, of explosion turning my world to flames or of hitting the ground. Sometimes though, I succeed, but in the end, it always ends the same: with waking, and thus forgetfulness.

Are these skills equivalent to real world skills? Do I retain some knowledge upon waking? Will they ever help me in the real world? Of course not. They're dreams, strange only because of my over-active imagination and too many video games. Nothing more. But still, one can only hope, and dream, that one is involved in a vast conspiratorial "Super-Soldier" program and your dreams are mental implants training you for when your powers finally develop.

Sweet dreams.