Recounting Dreams

Whenever possible, I’ve tried to record dreams in my morning journal hoping it can bring me closer to my subconscious.

Maybe it’s a foolish errand but Jung and Freud placed weight on the value of dreams as a way of communicating with one’s subconscious and I’m inclined to believe it has value. That is, if one were to believe that the subconscious, or unconscious, is the super-powerful computer that fully utilizes everything one’s brain has collected.

This particular dream has been a rare one I could remember to great length so I decided to share it as I think it out.

It starts with a room. A room surrounded by rusted walls that reminds one of being inside the hull of a large tanker ship. At least, that’s what I imagine when I see the massive tankers docked by the harbour.

I’m living in a place that has another family living there. We aren’t related and they don’t look at me as one of their own. I don’t know why but they are a Vietnamese family. There’s another companion who wears thick framed glasses and is obsessed with technology. Namely his phone and computers. He has no name and his distinguishing characteristics are his towering height, curly hair and chubby cheeks. He looks like someone who is a cheery fellow but who could easily rip off someone’s arm in a twist of emotions. He seems to like me but the Vietnamese family despises him.

I then find myself on a beach. A beach that is covered with snow and filled with children pushing themselves on sleds. At the edge of the long beach is an unending body of black water. It could be an ocean or a massive lake. I can’t tell. As the children squeal from being pushed on sleds, an alarm sounds and I find myself back in the rusted place I call home. I run out in a panic with the family and my big curly-haired friend.

We soon find ourselves on a boat the size of a yacht that could hold 20-30 individuals. It crashes through the waves to arrive at a new city. Before we can disembark to this new city, we need to be ferried into the harbour via a small boat. There are too many folks on this yacht so I’ve been relegated to the second trip. Me, the family, and the figure I call a friend.

As we wait, my curly-haired friend asks me to come to the side of the boat to take a selfie with him. I comply, knowing it to be an odd request. As we get ready, he drops his phone and it falls into the black water. He is visibly surprised but not upset. He shrugs it off as if it’s an everyday occurrence.

The father of the Vietnamese family approaches me in a fit of rage. He was on the losing side of a war. I was on the winning side of the war. That’s the context that’s played to me and he is angry that his side surrendered. To which I grab him by his collar and tell him to stop holding on to the past and let it go. I remind him that he might to be alive today to take care of his family, specifically his two daughters, if the war went on and he died fighting. I start seeing tears well up in his eyes as I see him turn away from me and I wake up.

It’s quite an odd dream. One I’ve never had before and I have no idea what it means. But it’s been replaying in the back of my mind at various points in the day so I thought it worth logging it. Maybe if I find this essay five years later, it will mean something then.

I don’t share this dream because I think it means anything particular but because I think it’s worth documenting such a practice. This one might not mean anything but the practice of being a fisherman that casts a net on one’s own subconscious seems like a worthy practice. It might be a shot in the dark but I won’t know until I do it for some time. Maybe you’ll want to try it too.