1156: Dream a Little Dream

Sometimes I like my subconscious. Sometimes it comes up with creative, awesome ideas or simply entertains me with peculiar, fascinating and sometimes grotesquely compelling images that then provide suitable fodder from which to compose a blog post later in the day. I know I have at least one friend for whom the experience he dubbed “the poo dream” is a source of considerable amusement.

Sometimes, though, I don’t like my subconscious. Today is one of those days.

I don’t tend to suffer from nightmares a lot. I don’t have many memories of being woken up suddenly by something unpleasant happening to me in my dreams, and I’ve certainly never done the Hollywoodesque thing of suddenly sitting bolt upright, wide awake and covered in sweat. This morning, though, my brain decided to show me some messed-up crap.

And yes, I said morning. As those of you who remember my previous posts on vivid dreams will remember, I tend to experience my most vivid flashes of weirdness from the subconscious after I’ve sort of kind of woken up once and drifted off back to sleep. In this case, it was shortly after Andie had gone out to work at half-past some ungodly hour in the morning, and I was far too tired to get out of bed at that point. So, without much encouragement required, I fell asleep again, and the peculiar images began.

This time around, I was back at my old secondary school. Specifically, I was in the music department’s main room. This was quite a big room with a stage at one end, though it was relatively rarely used for concerts when I was there — school concerts tended to take place in the large (and extremely reverberant) sports hall. Regardless of that, though, there was a concert going on this time around. I was set to perform. Specifically, I was set to perform Carnival of the Animals on the piano, which the astute and/or classically-trained among you will know is a piece of music that normally requires at least two people and two pianos and possibly some additional instruments too. However, for reasons that were at best unclear over the course of this dream, I was set to perform it solo, and I was extremely nervous about it.

I don’t remember anything else that was going on in the concert, but I remember the audience feeling somewhat rowdy. In fact, it felt more like a performance in front of a class of schoolkids than an actual concert — as I looked around, I remember noticing that the desks were laid out just as they always were — three rows, with another at 90 degrees to the rest of them down the side.

My time came to perform and I psyched myself up. I was going to give a small speech prior to starting my performance to explain why I was going to be performing Carnival of the Animals as a soloist, but as I stepped on stage the noise level from the audience (who, it was clearly evident by now, just were schoolkids) increased and increased and increased. I stood there mutely waiting for them to calm down so I could give my speech, but the hubbub didn’t dissipate. Eventually I gave up, laid my music down on the piano that was on stage and prepared to take a seat.

Suddenly, from out of the audience, out burst a kid who was a fairly notorious bully when I was back at school. His appearance in my dream was just as when I last saw him at the age of about 15. While I was at school, I didn’t have a lot of problems with this particular individual personally, but he was someone that I was wary of and tended to avoid whenever possible — not only because I was afraid of him, but also because I thought he was a bit of a tosser. Anyway, that aside, he leapt at me, and it wasn’t until it was too late that I saw he was wielding a knife. He slashed across me as he leapt at me. I didn’t feel anything, so I figured he missed.

Then I looked down and saw he hadn’t missed. The front of my clothing was stained crimson with blood, and the pain suddenly kicked in.

Then I woke up. That was not a pleasant way to wake up, I can tell you, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that it pretty much put a downer on most of the rest of my day. I’ve been feeling low and depressed all day and while I’m sure not all of it can be attributed to the activities of my subconscious, starting the day in that manner probably didn’t help.

But what does it mean? Well, aside from the apparent long-term damage to my sanity that classroom teaching did… who knows? And I’m not sure I want to know!