April 15th 2010 A Dream Out of a Franz Kafka Novel

Tonight I wanted to share a really weird dream I had this morning. It wasn’t scary, but it was so…stressful that it woke me from my slumber around 5 am, and prevented me from getting back to sleep until 6. In this dream, my mom and I were going on a trip. We were at the airport, and I was in a hurry to pick up the tickets because our plane was leaving soon. They were round-trip tickets, so I needed four of them. To get the tickets, I had to visit ticket booths in four different rooms in the terminal. But the “terminal” was no ordinary terminal. It was an old three-story mansion. Each floor was divided into quadrants. Room numbers were unique only to each quadrant, so, for example, each floor had four rooms labeled “5”. The rooms were connected by a twisted, maze-like hallway. Since each floor had several rooms with the same number, it was nearly impossible to tell if you had visited a particular room yet or not. I had to rush around to get the tickets before the plane took off. I don’t know if I was successful or not—the dream was so nerve-wracking that I woke up before I could get all of the tickets.

Maybe the mansion/terminal was symbolic of the complicated bureaucracies around which our society is built. Who knows what my mind was trying to make sense of.

I’ve been dreaming like crazy the past couple of months. I seem to go through phases with dreams: I’ll have none for months at a time, and then crazy dreams almost every night for a few months. This morning’s made me think of another dream I had during my freshman year of college, to which I alluded about a year and a half ago. In that dream, I fell down through some sort of hole and ended up in a strange world not unlike Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland. I ended up going on a long adventure to save a girl from some evil entity that ruled this strange world. I remember feeling like I could’ve written a cool book based on the dream; I hastily scribbled down what I could remember upon waking up, but those notes have long been lost, and now I can only remember tiny bits of the dream. That makes me sad—it was probably one of the best dreams I’ve ever had.