I met a high school girlfriend, from Utah, and we shared a glass of water. That was all. Where were we? We were both extremely thirsty and kept passing the glass back and forth, drinking, but it remained full of water.
We met many nights later, in a house that her family sold long ago, and finally, in an upstairs bedroom, consummated our relationship. This is something that never happened in our waking lives.
Then, a year later, in another dream, she’s working at a restaurant on a coast and I come to camp on the shore nearby. I tell her I want to be more to her than a visitor for a week, more than merely someone from her past, and she says “That’s what you said last time.” We’re talking at my campsite but a friend of hers, another waitress, is there, so we’re half-whispering and I’m uncomfortable because clearly the friend can hear all of this, and I have the slippery sense of embarrassment and failure—I know that this old girlfriend is referring to how poorly I behaved in the last dream, when we were reunited in her family’s old house.
If a dream can actually be aware of and refer to a previous dream as a history, is there a continuity, another life, somewhere?
Or it’s perhaps that I did not engage or resolve that waking relationship as I might have, that I was immature and hurtful, even without meaning to be, and so I must continue to live it again and again, to feel that sting of helplessness and shame at different stages in my life, to be reminded.
In these linked dreams, I seem to be almost fifty, my current age, and yet there’s no sign or awareness that I’m married or have children, or of any experiences since high school, since my failure with this person. There are no impedances or obstructions, only the possibility to fail again, to be incapable of summoning the necessary bravery or emotions or maturity. I must experience, anew and repeatedly, the mistrust of this person from my past.
The painter Charles Burchfield calls dreams a “strange world that seems a memory of childhood’s impressions partly, and partly something that I never have experienced. I have had many such lately; there is a glamour about them that makes them seem much more desirable than real life, an agonizing feeling that they represent a world that I can never hope to find.”
In his journal from December 5, 1961, Burchfield recounts a dream of a picnic where his family inadvertently takes and eats the food a poor family had left in a stream, to keep it cold. Apologies and reparations are made, and all ends well.
“Dreams like the above are inconsequential,” he writes. “But what puzzles me about them is that they contain situations which I never actually experienced or thought of, and people whom I never saw in my waking moments.”