I went back to NYC (I was there the week before shelter in place began) and was there with my room mate. We were trying to figure out activities we could do. I was anxious, sure most things were closed. She told me there would be a big open house at a hospital nearby. I said “I don’t think I’m comfortable going there with the crowds.” I thought, “I’m here, maybe I could probably get one really expensive meal out.” But realized I’d be dining not just by myself, but *entirely* by myself. I tried to figure out how to order bagels for delivery instead.
April 15, 2020
Last night I dreamed I was Chinese and living in China and I owned the apartment building we lived in. Something about that became illegal and the police were looking for me. I went into hiding by impersonating one of my servants (one of the women who cleaned the building).
The police went for my husband instead. He performed an awkward but rehearsed and well intended Ritual of Obsequiousness using the correct sheets of orange and gilt butterfly wrapping paper, so the police had to take him respectfully into custody.
It became apparent who I was, though, and the police were so enraged by my trickery and further frustrated by husband’s performance that they set upon me with huge black sticks. One hit me so hard my body flew upwards and crashed through the ceiling into the floor above.
It woke me up entirely.
April 11, 2020
I was hiking at some sort of Desert/volcano national park that had a resort inside the volcano. I got lost for a while and finally made it back to my car and began driving up the mountain. At the top where the opening of the volcano was there was a sharp turn and I was going way to fast. I went straight through the guard rail and plummeted towards a lava lake. Somehow I was ejected from the car and was sure I was about to die. But as dying in dreams never actually happens, I began to glide off of the hot air rising off of the lava. There was a bar built into the side of the rock and I barely landed up there, kicking joe Rogan in the back. And that is how I met Joe Rogan in my dream.
April 9th, 2020
Two dreams from Melissa Harrison:
(You may choose to post your dreams publicly or anonymously at this blog by commenting below or sending a direct message @newworlddreams twitter account)
In a completely new world I had been left to look after a little boy who was sleeping. Children were very precious and I had him in my house. i was cradling him as he slept. The house was empty and I needed to gather up his things ready for when they came to take him back and I had his things ready.
A friend brought in a kite the boy had had from outside and he was talking about the kite and how it works and how to fold it up and I was shushing him, saying ‘Please talk more quietly, please don’t wake him up.’ It was hard for my friend to talk quietly and I looked out of the window and there was a bare, ploughed field, and in the middle of the field there was something, I think it was a dish of water? or a mirror? and as I looked a black animal like a large dog or a deer, long legs, graceful, walked towards it. It was the blackest creature I’d ever seen, like a cut out or a hole, no three-dimensionality to it at all.
It was slender and slim and it touched its nose to the thing in the field, and then it looked up, startled, as a deer will, and bounded straight towards me and leaped in through the window, right into the room, it was terrifying, it was unearthly, it was crouching in the room and I lunged for it, I was worried about the little boy, but it leaped to another place in the room, and then another, like a grasshopper will when you try and put your hand on it, it was just gone and then it was somewhere else, and then it was out of the room, it was gone, and it was just me there with my heart banging and the little boy still asleep, and I wondered how I would ever explain it to anyone and I wondered what I had seen, this brief visitation in an empty house in an empty field, and the little boy’s kite that he had left behind. It felt very strange, very intense.
And then, later the same night, I dreamed that I was telling you this dream, Martha. We were in New York, in the back of a car, and I was relating it to you. And then that dream changed into something vague and a bit silly about Sex And The City. And then I was in a packed British cathedral for a church service and there was nowhere to sit, and there were so many people, all together. I had to cram in on a wobbly chair at the end of a pew, and I didn’t know anyone and I was late. And then I heard a noise behind me and a man had been sick, and his vomit, which was pale and milky and not that disgusting, like when a baby spits up, had splashed on the woman next to me’s coat, and possibly on the back of mine.
April 7, 2020
March 23, 2020: I woke up about 3:45 from a nightmare.
It seems I had gone to Texas (to see my family or something-no idea why I was there but I am from Texas) and when I tried to come back to Missouri where I live, the police were at every border crossing and refusing to let people in/out because Texas wasn’t part of the US anymore.
My 20 year old daughter was with me and we were both born in Texas. So they said we were the property of Texas and we had to stay. It was unclear as to what would be expected of us. It was very clear that we were not free.
But I knew how to drive at night without lights (my dad who died last year and whom I miss terribly had taught me this) and we waited until the new moon (one happens tonight/tomorrow and I knew this when I went to bed last night) and I know all the back roads because my dad taught me that also. He worked oilfield for 42 years and knew unmarked and unpaved roads well and taught me how to navigate without a compass or map. So we were able to sneak out by driving halfway across the state and all the way up into the panhandle and go north into Oklahoma and Kansas. There is an area there that is a NASA “dark sky” area meaning zero light pollution, so no lights.
But when we got back into the US, we were told we were illegal aliens even though we both have US passports since we couldn’t explain how we got into the US. I had turned off the navigation system in the car and we had taken batteries out of our phones so we couldn’t be traced via satellite. We knew we were being watched – that’s why I had turned everything off. But there were cameras everywhere once we got out of Texas (Ring doorbells, private security cameras – all of which the police now controlled) and we just started appearing on cameras but they couldn’t trace where we’d come from because no satellite tracking.
And then police tried to confiscate our birth certificates which we had with us (?) and our US passports. And then I woke up…… in a state of panic and shock and terror.
I’m not usually one to wake up or to remember dreams. Usually only if they are bad – really bad or just really weird – do I wake up. In fact, this is only the third dream in 52 years that I remember. And in one I escaped aliens by staying in the darkness. The other I drove into a void on my commune home from a bad job. They all involve escape via total darkness.
I’m also not one to read much into dreams. However, this one isn’t hard figure out. At all.
It’s part Trump authoritarianism, white nationalism (even though I’m white), part Handmaid’s Tale (which I haven’t seen or read, but from what I understand of it), part Texas nationalism (yes there is that).
The other thing is that 2-3 days after this dream, Texas set up check points at the border exactly where they were in my dream.
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Last night I dreamed that New York city was on fire, burning. I kept flying over it back and forth. Would land, talk to someone in my life (there was a classmate from elementary school?) but I would just circle around it. I just recently moved to New Jersey after living in NYC for 10 years. My parents are in PA with my sister in quarantine and haven’t been home in almost a month. I think it all feels like I’m there in the ground zero, but like I did in real life, I was able to fly out of the danger.
April 2, 2020
I had such a strange dream last night. I can’t shake the heavy fog of sleep.
I was with friends. We were out watching something. Someone was being funny or entertaining and I was lost in the watching of them.
Then this woman who I didn’t know was there and she was ordinary. Like a woman in her 50’s you’d see anywhere around here.
And as I was lost in watching this person do a trick or a balancing act the woman looked at me and was a bit startled.
She said “You are the only person I’ve come across who knows they will die in under a year and are ok with it”
As if she just reads people’s inner truths.
And it startled me. I recognized its truth in a sense but I wasn’t trying to be vulnerable so it made me feel exposed and I cried and felt all the hurt and said I didn’t know how.
She said of course you do. You do it with love.
And I said it hurts because of all the sad I’ll leave behind and she said do it with love.
April 1 2020
Had a dream that I woke up with my eyes glued shut, think crusted over with gunk like you have just had the pink eye. I somehow make my way to my job (not my actual work place but where dream me worked). It’s a tall glass building in the city. As I’m entering the building I get texts and calls from my co workers telling me that I am not suppose to be at work. They ask me what I am doing there since no one is in the office. I tell them that I need to get my eyes fixed. I finally get inside to the top floor and meet a doctor who pours cold liquid on my eyes allowing them to finally open. This whole time, unable to see I have just been feeling around to make it to the building. That’s it, that’s the dream I got my eyes fixed and went home. It was very vivid. I had a slight moment of panic where I thought I was going to wake up that morning with my eyes glued shut. I told my therapist and she said I should a)stop reading twitter before bed and b) think about how I at least I got my eyes open in the end.
Dreams of a New World 