I’m interested in dreams and in others’ experiences. I never question them because my own dream experiences are so unusual.
People report visits from departed loved ones and angels as they sleep. Others are reminded of things they wish to forget—things they saw, things they shouldn’t have done, things they’ve avoided doing. Perhaps you’ve dreamed of true love or of achieving great things. Perhaps your dreams are of unnatural, unreal things, things that never lived and never should live. Everything is possible in dreams.
Dreams appear in serious literature. Hamlet’s main concern (Act III, Scene 1) in contemplating suicide is that he might dream, “For in that sleep of death what dreams may come?” Prospero comforts us in The Tempest (Act 4, Scene 1); what we’ve witnessed is simply illusion, bound sooner or later to melt into “thin air” … “such stuff as dreams are made of.”
In the Bible (Acts 2:17), Luke tells us that, “in the last days … Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams.”
Dreams play a major role in speculative fiction. Has the sound of Freddy Krueger’s claw fingers screeching across bare pipes chilled you in Nightmare on Elm Street? Have you wanted to get into others’ dreams and steal their secrets like Dominick Cobb does in Inception? Maybe you’ve wanted to alter past and present reality, like George Orr does in Ursula Le Guin’s novel and movie, The Lathe of Heaven.
In my dreams, I seem fully aware. Sometimes I suspend disbelief and enjoy the show as entertainment. Other times I interact to affect the outcome. Memories of these experiences carry from dream to dream, enabling me to learn from them and form long-term relationships with my ‘dream people’. I’ve kept some of these friendships since early childhood. Rob, Connie, Josh and I have grown up together.
My dream friends help me solve problems and have demonstrated knowledge I don’t believe that I ever possessed. When they reveal future events that then occur, it gives me pause. My dream friends have also given me the impression that all dream creatures dwell in a common dreamscape.
In 2001, I saw A Beautiful Mind, the fine movie about John Nash, the Nobel Prize winning mathematician who was plagued by schizophrenic delusions. In those delusions, fictional people beset Nash to the point where he couldn’t differentiate them from real people.
That night my dream friends visited me. They screamed. I listened.
Rob stabbed the air with his finger while he paced beside my bed. “Never, never, can a dream person interfere in waking life … not in that way.” He shook his finger in my face. “You have to know that, Keith. You have to know we’d never do that to you. That’s criminal.” I nodded. Two other dream friends nodded, too. “Nash’s dream people broke the code.” He shook his head in disgust.
I assured everyone that I understood and trusted them. We hugged and they let me go back to sleep.
In my next post, I’ll tell you another dream story: how a series of nightmares brought me this unusual gift. In the meantime, “Row, row, row your boat,” and remember, “Life is but a dream.”
Have you had unusual dream experiences?
Strange Things Done 
Lathe of Heaven is one of my favorite, an underpraised work by LeGuin. No unusual dream happenstances for me, but I was convinced I could fly as a child because I did so in dreams. I just never did the rest of the time because I didn’t happen to want to. Even now, I still feel that conviction, while knowing that falseness of it.
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Like you I’m surprised Lathe of Heaven hasn’t gotten more attention. It is original and complex and that may be the problem. Some people are thrown by new ideas, others hunger for them. I flew in my dreams too … I had to learn because my falling dreams were like nightmares. Once I learned to fly that became part of the adventure.
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