REM in the water

(Disclaimer - Apologies for late post; I've spent the last three days in a house in the Bay Area with no internet access)

Last night I had another swimming pool dream.

I dreamt (tangent: spellcheck doesn't like 'dreamt;' is this a dying word?) I was headed to an IM inner tube water polo game; I was captain, and I really wanted our team to win, so I made sure to be at the pool early. The pool was located on Third street in between B and C and was about the size of a football field. Although I had attempted to be the first arrival, everyone was already there. My team consisted of some seventy people, some of whom were good friends, some of whom were random people from my life who occasionally make cameos in my dreams (i.e. the pharmacist from Rite Aid). I remember feeling aggravated because everyone was in the pool but no one was playing well; everything just seemed chaotic and loud. I jumped in the pool and sank slightly, until my body came to rest about seven feet below the surface. I could see hundreds of legs treading water above me, but then the water started to get cloudy and kind of milky in color. I tried to swim, but kept running into people since I couldn't see, so I had to surface. My friends M and K came but didn't want to get in the pool which made me mad. Then the first chair of the flute section from my high school symphonic band swam up in an orange headband and purple leg warmers and stuck a water bottle (our "ball") behind a napkin-sized net (our "goal"). Then all of a sudden I was the referee and I told her and one of her friends that they couldn't put the water bottle behind the net because it was cheating, and they got mad and swam away to the other side of the pool. And I was mad because they were cheating.

The weirdest part of my dream, however, came at a point where I had a bird's eye view of everything and noticed that there was a HUGE (think two or three of our classrooms combined) Pyrex baking dish lying on the bottom of the pool.

I suppose at this point it is needless to say that I have strange dreams.

Though I feel that dream interpretation is, to quote Truman, "Forty-nine percent B.S.," I do wonder what my dreams might mean. There are some dreams I've had where I clearly recognize elements from the previous day, while other dreams have recurred so often they've become more like television reruns than subconscious analyses. I've had dreams about driving, about dying, about spiders and cats and coffee and money; I've dreamt that I was old, that I was a child, that I was Alexis Bledel, that I was a guy. I once even dreamt that I was split into two people and my brothers (which I don't actually have) were trying to kill my other half with their rotting, mold-encrusted socks (it was at this point in the dream that I realized I was asleep and woke up laughing).

But swimming pools have worked their way into my dream rotation on multiple occasions. Does that mean something? Would I unlock some hidden chamber in my subconscious if I could decode the meaning of the deep blue basin?

I still remember my high school psychology teacher trying to explain a dream to me (my dream had again been about a swimming pool, taking place this time at night on the top of a massive diving board with me wearing ski boots and a snow parka; my paper on this dream is still tucked away in my nightstand). The pool, he said, usually represents some kind of peace or placidity; it is a calming symbol. In other cases, however, it may simply represent the unconscious itself.

It seems slightly funny to me to be swimming in your unconscious during a period of unconsciousness. But let's run with this for a minute; how could my dream be interpreted if the pool is in fact my unconscious?

The logical first question to ask is, "What was in the pool?" One could assume that whatever was in the pool is also in my unconscious. So we have:

Me
legs
cloudy, milky water
people (both friends and acquaintances)
water bottle
tiny nets
giant Pyrex baking dish

The logical next question is, "What do each of these elements mean?"

Anybody?

I've got a hunch the dream dictionary doesn't have an entry for "Pyrex baking dish."

But maybe there's a reason dreams are so random and obscure. Perhaps they serve as an outlet for everything wiggety-wack in our heads while we sleep so that we can lead relatively normal lives awake. If my brain feels the need to work something out, I'd rather it do it behind the veil of sleep than while I'm grocery-shopping or eating dinner.

Or swimming.

And maybe trying to understand dreams defeats the purpose of dreaming. Maybe dreams are a way for us to clear the psychological refuse from our heads so that we can spend each day refreshed. Maybe "everything will be better in the morning" because our minds will have been emptied of the crap collected over the course of the day.

If that is indeed the case, I think I'll head to bed.



(RF's interpretation of the dream in his words:

The water is non-fat milk.
The dish is because you like baking.
The water bottle is for bathrooms.
The nets are because you feel like a goldfish and they are napkin-sized because I make messes.)