A GIRL CAN DREAM

I'm lucid AF and ready to go

Oct 19, 2024

It won’t surprise you to learn that my dreams have been wild over the last few months, because I’m sure yours have been too.

For the last year since I self-published my rock-and-roll love story, The Sound Of Settling, I’ve been having what feels like a series of recurring dreams. In the past, I would have stress-related recurring dreams about sharks or The Exorcist, which had scarred my teenage brain for life.

Thankfully, my subconscious has cycled through all of that and figured out new ways to work shit out in my R.E.M. cycles. Think of it as discovering a new streaming show with several seasons, with yours truly as the main character going through her redemption arc.

In what we’ll call Season One, I was either trying to get out of a hotel or a mall, opening doors that I thought would take me outside but only led to more hallways or stairwells.

I didn’t need a dream dictionary to figure those out, although I did look up “mall” just to see what it said, and this part was spot-on: When the mall appears to be empty, closed, or abandoned in your dream it could reflect your insecurities, choices, and wants or desires to obtain.

Uh, yeah.

Then I managed to progress to a different series of dreams in Season Two. I had made it outside and was in an amusement park. Roller coasters and such. I was the only one there, the midway was empty, but all of the games had stuffed animals hanging all over them. Midway through the season, I managed to find the exit. Then I was seeing it from a slight distance, but I couldn’t be sure if I was on my way there or if I was just avoiding the roller coasters. What I do know is that I was literally moving past the amusement park on a train. I was a passenger, not an engineer.

Again, no need to page Dr. Freud, because at that time I was unemployed and terrified.

After I finally got off the train in the first episode of Season Three, there was a series of dreams where I was being driven around neighborhoods—once again a passenger instead of the driver—that were a combination of my hometown of Hazlet, NJ, and my current city of Portland, OR. I kept seeing one house in particular, a green Craftsman with a front porch, but on the street where I grew up or on a shady street somewhere here. I’ve never lived in a Cratfsman of any color, but they’re everywhere here, so maybe my brain put that all together to start closing the loop from my first house to my future forever house? Seems logical.

In the last few weeks, I’ve been re-bingeing The West Wing, which may seem like a weird way to decompress after a full day of politics, but the recent 25th Anniversary celebration at the real White House made me want to revisit the Bartlet administration. It makes sense that Season Four started with dreams about being the White House Press Secretary under President Kamala Harris or speaking at her rallies; CJ Cregg is one of my favorite TV characters of all time and I was also writing about Kamala all day. But I was behind podiums making speeches.

Again, no need to look any of that up. HOWEVER:

A few days after I had my first West Wing White House-related dream, I found out that the Sexy Liberal show I’m going to in LA right before Election Day had added two more guests along with Mark Hamill (!!!): Rep. Adam Schiff and President Jed Bartlet himself, Martin Sheen.

My brain had a small explosion, which I’m sure you get.

I think Season Five began last night because I had a dream that was completely different from any other dream I’ve had in months, if not years. Or maybe ever, I don’t know.

But what I do know is that I was flying. There are so many different ways to interpret dreams about flying, of course. Most of them are connected to fear, but this one wasn’t. Flying dreams are considered some of the most symbolic and often the most lucid dreams because you can feel the sensation of being in the air even while you’re asleep. And I definitely felt like I was airborne.

I was flying miles above what looked like a football stadium combined with the Colosseum in Rome. I had a huge multi-colored parachute I could control and I had lucid thoughts like This is so great! How cool is this?! But how am I going to get down?

I wasn’t scared at all. I was exhilarated. I looked down and saw I was wearing red sneakers and happily kicking my feet as I flew, like a kid on a swing. The ground below was blurred because I was still so far above it, and I made my way down through small puffy clouds until I could get closer.

Then I landed on the very top step of the stadium, which was one long circle around the whole arena. It was made of very soft purple foam block material. I thought to myself that I’d had a soft landing.

“Soft Landing” is one of the songs by Case Closed, the band in The Sound of Settling, amateur shrinks who are still reading this.

I wasn’t alone on that very top step of that very huge stadium. I turned my head and sitting right next to me was…

Zendaya.

I don’t know why Zendaya would be in any dream of mine. I’m aware of her in the way that you’re aware of incredibly famous people, but I don’t pay attention to the gossip about her. I didn’t watch Euphoria or Dune or the Spiderman movies, and I haven’t seen her tennis threesome movie. I didn’t see her face or name on any screen I had looked at yesterday. Why did my GenX brain conjure a GenZ queen?

But ANYWAY, Zendaya was there and she was smiling at me, radiant with no makeup, her hair wild in the wind. “Isn’t this the best?” she asked, brushing her hair back from her forehead, her face close to mine, like we shared a secret. “We can go anywhere!” She tapped a finger on my nose and then flew away.

I sat there in the stadium, my parachute on my lap, crying happy tears. We can go anywhere, I thought. This is our place, we make the rules.

Which is a Taylor Swift lyric.

And then I woke up.

It was 6 am, and I had one cat lying on my feet and another one right next to me. I immediately wanted to know what it all meant. This time, I looked it up.

Flying Dream Symbolism