April 14, 2007

• Somebody Else’s Nightmares

  These are not exactly recurring dreams.  I have had several series of recurring dreams at various times of my life.  In the earliest set I recall, during my childhood, I saw myself as a young woman in eighteenth century dress, searching for my father in the British West Indies.  Later on, I realized that those dreams were based on memories of a past life.

  Other recurring dreams of mine have been the common sort that many people report having, such as finding oneself naked in public, or being late for class and unable to find the classroom.  I haven’t had one of them in years.  A recurrent theme that haunted my sleep in the 1970s involved a post-apocalyptic cityscape and running firefights with automatic weapons.  Around the same time, another series had me walking through a warm autumn night in a midwestern city, being followed by lions and unable to find a door that would open to shelter me.  None of these has recurred for a couple of decades.

  My dream life is still rich, colorful and interesting, but generally less violent and ominous than it used to be.  The notable exceptions to that are these dreams that don’t seem like my dreams.  Not truly a recurring series, they are more like a continuing story that comes in episodes.  The scene changes with each dream, and circumstances change with the continuity of a serial story.

  These are unlike any other dreams I have ever had.  The difference is not in the scenery, but in both the theme of the series of dreams and the feel of them, the sense I have upon waking that this wasn’t my dream, but someone else’s.  I don’t mean that in the dream I seem to be a detached observer.  That “observer” mode is one I often experience in my dreams, as if I’m watching a movie, but in this series of dreams I am right in there, interacting with others, making decisions, and watching the action unfold through my own eyes.

  What makes these dreams feel alien to me is something subtler, a “feel” that just isn’t there in any of my other dreams.  My dreams, except for these, are generally comprehensible to me.  I can trace their triggers to events in my life (or lives), to my own hopes, fears, fantasies, experiences, attitudes, or philosophies.  Even in dreams that originate in my past lives, I recognize my self in the dream as myself.  The person I become in these dreams neither thinks nor behaves as I do.  She is somebody else entirely.

  In the twenty-some years that I have been having these dreams, with a frequency of less than one a year — maybe seven or eight episodes in all — I have been following this woman through a moderately successful criminal career.  My own criminal career was a spotty and petty thing, an avocation at times, a subsistence lifestyle at others, but never a true career.  Her crimes, unlike mine, are strictly white-collar, and unlike anything in either my real life, my past lives, or my fantasy life.

  This woman’s life is centered on her crimes.  She plots big scores, and carries out her plans meticulously.  Then she disappears, adopts a new identity, and lives comfortably on her ill-gotten gains as she plans her next score.  She has no long-term or intimate relationships.  Her associates are casual or distant connections, and always transient, as she drifts from place to place one step ahead of the law.  If such a life had any attraction for me, I’d be doing it, not dreaming about it.  These dreams are nightmares to me.  I wake from each one with a sense of cold dread that evaporates as I realize with relief that it was only a dream.

  In the time that I have been following her, she has developed and her crimes have changed with the times.  Back in the late ‘seventies or early ‘eighties, when the series started, she was running a check-kiting scam, profiting from bank float, building up her assets with scores of increasing magnitude.  Until I started having these dreams, I didn’t know anything about float.  Curiosity about the dreams led me to ask some questions and follow some clues, and that’s how I learned the little bit I know about bank fraud.

  Each of the dreams in the series has had a flavor of fear and furtiveness.  Just now, a series of images from several dreams flashed through my mind.  They were street scenes from several cities.  The only one I thought I recognized was Alma, Oklahoma.  One of them appeared to be somewhere like Montana or Wyoming.  Another one might have been an eastern city because there were many large old buildings.  In all of them, she was in a state of high anxiety because she knew her crimes had been detected and the paper trails necessitated relocation and a new identity.

  Recently, the woman in my dreams has gotten into identity theft.  She
  has also formed an ongoing relationship with someone who electronically
  watches her back.  Always, throughout the whole series, she was
  continually looking over her shoulder, both literally and
  figuratively.  She is paranoiac due to her lifestyle.  The man who now monitors her electronic backtrail is even more paranoid than she is.  They appear to be an effective team. 

  In the latest dream, he was informing her that the Feds were onto her, and they were discussing the measures that each of them needed to take to cope with the situation.  She was more relaxed and at ease than I have ever seen her.  Her partner has taken a lot of the pressure off, which is ironic because they connected while he was hunting her.  He is a government agent.

  This would make an interesting novel.

  Now, there’s a thought….  If I’m ever going to succeed as a fiction writer, it will have to be in some manner such as this, because I’m imagination-challenged, absolutely no good at making things up.

  

  • 2:26 pm
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