The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of

My wife, Cristina, and I were lying on my parent's bed in their  house on West Seneca Street in Oswego.  I heard the front door bell ring.  I wanted to ignore it hoping whomever it was would go away.  It kept ringing.  I did not respond.  Eventually, I noticed someone standing in the foyer just inside the front door.  It was a man wearing glasses.  At first, I was stunned.  Then, he started walking towards us.  I was in shock.  I couldn't budge.  As he got closer, I saw he had a gun which he was pointing at me.  I was very frightened.  I started shouting, "Who are you?  Who are you?"

Then Cristina woke me up.  She said I was shouting in my sleep.  It was just a dream.  It reminded me of another dream I had years ago when I was living in North Carolina.  I was lying alone on my bed at night trying to fall asleep when I noticed a dark, forbidding figure approaching me very slowly.  I was frozen with fear, not able to move or shout for help.  Finally, I woke up from this awful dream, almost as a defense mechanism.  Who needs these types of dreams?

I dream a lot, or I should say I remember a lot of my dreams.  And I believe that most of them are negative.  For years, I dreamed of being in school and having some kind of a problem: I can't find the exam site, I arrive late for the exam, I didn't study for the exam, I won't be able to graduate, etc. 

Then there are the Frank Ruggio (see blog post 12/29/2014 - A Weekend in New York) dreams.  He was my best friend from seventh grade through high school.  After graduation, I turned my back on Frank while finding new friends in a new life far from Oswego.  When I returned for our 25th high school reunion in 1988, I wanted so much to talk to him and rekindle our friendship.  Too late.  Frank died of cancer six months before.  I was full of regrets.  I have had many dreams since then when I talk to Frank only to wake up to the realization that he is really dead.  Bummer!  (I've also had dreams talking to my deceased parents and brother, Ted.)

Besides the Frank Ruggio dreams, I have had an inordinate number of dreams where I am in Oswego, my home town, a place I left almost fifty years ago and have unfortunately been back relatively few times since, outside of my dreams.

Not all my dreams are negative, only most of them.  In a recent one, I told a friend that a movie I wrote won an Academy Award, as if I were Dalton Trumbo with Spartacus (see last week's post).

Near the end of the 1941 film, The Maltese Falcon, the actor, Ward Bond, asks, "What is that?" referring to a statuette of a bird.  Humphrey Bogart responds, "The stuff that dreams are made of."  Really? 

Near the end of the 1971 film, Big Jake, the actor, Richard Boone, asks the same question referring to a trunk full of a ransom for the grandson of a rich man who had been kidnapped.  I couldn't believe that John Wayne's reply was an exact copy of Bogart's.  Is nothing sacred?

I never have dreams where I receive a valuable work of art or millions of dollars.  There seems to be a divide between my experiences with bad dreams and a cultural belief that people dream of something wonderful.  For example, "My dream is to have a million dollars."  Perhaps the word "wish," as in "I wish I had a million dollars" would be preferable to the word "dream."  That would make more sense.  It's the stuff that wishes are made of. 

But, why do I have such terrible dreams while I am sleeping?   Sigmund Freud "believed dreams are a window into our subconscious.  He believed they reveal a person's unconscious desires, thoughts, motivations.  Freud thought dreams were a way for people to satisfy urges and desires that were unacceptable to society." 

However, there are a lot of various theories about dreams that are still being researched.  One such is that our mind is simply trying to entertain us while we sleep.  I wish mine would stop trying.