full night full of dreams, by Jennifer
For my Oneironauticum experience, I slept with a sachet, working with the scent of mugwort. Over the course of the night, I woke several times throughout the night, either because the smell was too strong—in which case I moved it away from my face—or because it had grown too weak—so I pulled it closer again. Interestingly, I found that bringing the scent closer to my face caused me to remember dreams I’d had earlier in the evening, in much the same way that moving into the same sleeping position I’d held (on the right side, on the left side, on my back) sometimes helps me remember a dream from an earlier period of sleep.
When I woke, I felt like I’d been immersed in a carnival of dreams all night long. In addition to my normal recall of three longer narrative dreams, I remembered a couple great short snippets. In the interests of brevity, I’ll only pull out a few central images from the night.
My first dream, early in the night, featured swooping architecture and me dressed as a jellyfish. My second long dream involved me driving with my family through my dream version of Toronto. I go there often enough in my dreams that I have a mental map of the place. We were driving in a VW van but it was my father’s, not mine. We were on a track like a rollercoaster, swooping steeply down incredibly fast. I could see the tracks through the bottom of the floor, and I remember thinking it was vertiginous, and wondering if other people felt this much intensity when they drove with me in my van. In the third long dream, several people and I became alarmed that our friend had gone missing. We set out to search for her, and at one point were all running down a dusty, rock-strewn path. I was barefoot and therefore couldn’t run as fast as I wanted. I find myself inappropriately barefoot often in my dreams.
In the first of the two snippets of dream, I looked up at a star-filled night sky, the sort you only see in the countryside. White flame began to lick up among the stars. Then I stood on a hillside over San Francisco at night watching the fog roll in very quickly. It was all incredibly beautiful.
The final snippet, from which I woke a mere ten minutes before the alarm would have woken me, occurred as I surfaced close to consciousness, half wanting to go back to sleep, half thinking I should wake up and write down my dreams. Three psychiatrists stood at a bar with their backs to me, discussing me as if they didn’t know I was in the room.
“What do you think, should she wake up and write down her dream or not?”, one asked.
“I think she should probably keep sleeping. She needs to be fresh for her class.”
“I think she should wake up. She might forget her dreams if she doesn’t write them down.”
They went on in this vein for a while. Then one of them spun around as if he’d just noticed me and somewhat embarrassedly stuck out his hand as if to shake mine, saying “Oh, hello there! I’m Dr…” at which point I woke