My lack of sleep lately-- just an inevitability due to my overnight job-- has spelled out strange reactions from me. Runs the gamut, really, from hysteria to thoughtfulness to long stretches of deep sleep when given the chance (to make up for the long, long stretches sans). This deep sleep has given me a variety of LONG, wacko dreams that aren't really worth recounting (a shamelessly long musical/play on the stage of my childhood church, trying to find my friend Kate in creepy downtown LA while she tries to give me directions to a Japanese ice cream place on the phone.. things like that), but I had one last night that woke me up with a strange feeling.
I don't remember the specifics of it at all. It had a grey "look" to it, and occasionally a Contagion feel (apparently my mind choses its cinematographers carefully). It was frenzied at times, but mostly , sad. It bounced back and forth between several "storylines" and I wasn't always present in what was going on (a VERY odd quality of many of my dreams, which leads me to believe I must think like a filmmaker), but the MAIN idea of the dream was that the world as we know it had stopped. Something horrible had happened that shut things down. Either the world was crumbling or something BAD had occurred that meant improper international communication, currency was meaningless, and our general function as a society was moot. The only "scene" I really remember from the whole thing was set on a college campus in Japan (or an American college with alot of Asian students...), where I was visiting my friend. Things were just very, very wrong, and cars were blown out and abandoned, and only a straggle of students were left for finals week, and my friend was still insisting that he needed to finish his tests and that I needed to pick him up. His cat was starving and half-crazed, and the entire campus was stony and broken and bizarre. And I sat with him on the steps of this huge part of campus and tried to make sense of things. I woke up with the weirdest, most haunting feeling of pointlessness. Why on earth were people trying to cling to their normal lives here? Why study and go to school and try to pay for things in a useless currency and drive fancy cars when all of that no longer matters? When the importance of human society is boiled down to survival, or at least the most basic human needs, why was everyone still acting as if it was important to do these things? The world was ending, why pay for a useless degree with useless money? There would be no jobs afterward. There would be building a cabin or a fire in a cave. It was an alarming, dark feeling.
I have had MANY dystopian-themed dreams, which is interesting as I'm not particularly interested in that type of thing (though when it comes to scifi I suppose that's my primary vision-- P.K. Dick/Mad Max kind of stuff). I have had alot of dreams with themes to that end, and even when those themes aren't present there's that FEELING. I don't know why. Do androids dream of electric sheep?
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