I seem to be back in the crazy/hectic dream phase once again. For the first time in a long while, I had one of my “elevator” dreams a few nights ago. These are pure anxiety dreams, akin to dreams I used to have, after graduating from college, about having forgotten to have gone to a class all semester.
Anyway, the way these dreams ususally go, I get into an elevator, hit the button for the floor I want. Then the lights go out, and the elevator drops into an impossibly deep basement, where I am trapped.
This time it was a little different. The lights did not go out and there were other people in the elevator with me. However, if I pushed the button for the top floor (say, 30th), the elevator would continue up, up, up forever. If I pushed a button for the bottom floor, it would continue going down, down, down forever.
With usual dream-logic, I decided to pick up the phone in the elevator and call for help. At the time, however, the elevator was going down to the first floor, and once the floor hit about -10, there was the clear sound of the “phone line” snapping off because clearly we’d gone down too far.
These dreams come in waves and they came more often the more stressed out I was. However, I don’t feel stressed out at all recently, and so I really can’t explain why I’d have one of these dreams. Nowadays, I find them more amusing than anything else. They are better than the tiring dreams, which just wear me out.
I had one of these tiring dreams last night, and I can’t remember a single thing about it, but I woke up feeling like I’d run a marathon. I favor the theory that the primary function of dreaming is to commit short-term memory to long-term memory and then to purge your short-term memory. Under these circumstances, I can understand there being a lot of stuff to commit. Will Durant’s Our Oriental Heritage, is just packed with facts and figures, names and dates, of which I am making a conscious effort to remember better than usual. So it’s possible that’s what’s causing these exhausting dreams.
Honestly, I don’t know how Freud ever got away with his ridiculous theories.
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