Dreaming Disaster

I have had several dreams where reality was explicitly a joke, a scam, a seeming reality created for different purposes, as in The Sting where one man’s reality is created to get his money, as in the Matrix where humans were all scammed for the money. Always such dreams have me believing I am in big trouble that generates great emotion, and in the end there is the relief and even comedy of it all being a game after all. These out-of-time dreams seem very familiar to me, an old joke I had forgotten, great relief at understanding the truth again that reality is not what we think it is. We are not what we seem. 

The last time I had such a dream of adventure, it was about separation from my daughter. She and I were secret agents or some such, running from the bad guys and playing Indiana Jones through a big mechanical building with a huge pool. I showed her tricks and she showed me tricks and we outran the bullets together. It was high fun.

More recently I dreamed a big party that I was giving in our home. It was me giving it -  and everyone from my whole life seemed to be invited. The House (that didn't look like my house but was) was done to the nines with a huge pyre in the middle of the living room upon which were dozens of stones that were being heated to the right temp for the big finale, not that I knew what that was going to be! The pyre was made of a huge pile of interesting stuff, stuff collected presumably by me throughout my life. The walls were also covered with stuff, interesting and lovely stuff, and I was decorating the few blank spaces with my friend. Worried that the hot stones would fire up too soon, I asked my son and his heavy metal band friends, dressed in their robes, to carefully remove them to the yard until we needed to put them back later at a certain time for the big grand finale. They were doing that while enormous numbers of people were arriving and milling, and I told my closest friends that I had a big surprise for them, and we would sneak out while the boys were busy with their task and have a look at it.

Out we went and drove in a car to a futuristic looking entrance to a new party experience, a trip aboard a monster space ship to a place off the earth. There were men in space suits at the entrance, selling us on the experience, and we took the tour with many others. Outside the space ship, there was another, huger device, like a gigantic moving dock made of oval-shaped pods and put together like molecules that gravitated around the ship.  Once on board the space ship, huge and something like a dirigible inside, there came pouring in all the people from our party. They had followed us, except for the boys who were left tending the stones. We had a great time for a while and watched the giant pod thing through the windows, when there was some kind of awful emergency and people panicked, smoke and flame everywhere. My decorating friend and I tried to get ourselves home only to find that most of the tourists had fled ahead of us and had taken all the cars – there was no way home for 33 of us – I counted our people among the others stuck there, and anxiety levels began to rise. There was no way off the ship and we were going to miss the big grand finale at my party. The tension was extremely strong being locked in a space ship away from the earth, the proportions as in a disaster movie. 

Then, one of our group had been skulking around investigating and discovered by falling through a window that the whole off-the-earth thing was a hoax, that they had manipulated gravity so that it felt like we were somewhere else but that in truth you could just walk outside and leave, go back through the main entrance. That the whole experience was misdirection, even though the devices were magnificent. Like Star Wars magnificent. Like Las Vegas magnificent.

I woke up during the last part of this dream and began to think about it to remember it, so I never got back to my party, never found out what the big finale was. But the coherence of the dream seemed to be significant – I thought it would make a great movie, the moral of which would be to examine your assumptions (which were sold to us by the people marketing the ride) when disaster strikes. Perhaps it only seems like disaster, while the quantum world continues to move in greased grooves.