dreaming mind's agenda is different than the waking mind's
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This dream has been viewed 8012 times.
I'm in someone's apartment playing a joke on them. I'm heating up quarters with a blue gas flame and pressing them into the lenses of his sunglasses. Oddly, the rule for this dream is that sunglass lenses are made of this pliant material that's almost like clay. The flame is coming from a painting brush that I lit in the kitchen and brought out to the living room -- natural gas emits from the fibers of the brush, and this is what is on fire.Then I see that the heater, which is also gas, has ignited a drape hanging over a window above the vent. I grab and fire extinguisher and put it out, but then I see that there's another fire in the floor -- it's red hot and has just about burnt all the way through the carpet and the floor. It looks like a mini-caldera, almost like this volcanic one:
Hawaii Pictures/Volcano Caldera Picture
I soak that with the white foam of the extinguisher.
But I keep finding more fires: the next one is on a woman's clothes who is lying on a couch, and who I didn't see when I first came in. She starts screaming because her arm is on fire. I put that out.
However, I find three more women who are also on fire, each one worse than the one before. I keep putting out the fires. The last one is a young woman in a chiffon pattern dress and one whole sleeve is on fire. I put it out, but realize I'm going to have to call 911 because she probably has burn injuries.
I wake up, my heart pounding
It takes me a while to go back to sleep. When I do, I'm in the story of some girl's life, as the girl. Her parents split up, and her dad is a doctor. The dad and the daughters (she has two sisters) move to a distant city.
The trip is perilous, though, with much ice on the road. At one point I'm driving and I can't seem to stop the car from rolling down the shoulder of the road that's on an incline. I finally get it to stop, but I have to let the clutch out to get it to go in reverse or else it will fall off a cliff.
(shift) I'm in the new place we were moving to, already in school. I go jogging on a track in the city.
Then I'm about to start my studies. I realize that I need to stimulate my mind more. I decide to take calculus and am really excited by the idea that I'll get to really see if I have an ability in this area.
But the quality of the dream has started to fall off (people are changing their appearance right while I'm looking at them, walls are disappearing, etc.), and this is what makes me realize that I'm dreaming. It doesn't matter, I think to myself, I can take calculus in my waking life, too!
I shake my head back and forth to wake up, but as I do so I slowly realize that I am NOT interested in taking calculus in real life. I then keep going back and forth between the dream and waking (shaking my head slightly back and forth each time I go to awaken), not understanding why I am so gung-ho about taking calculus in the dream, while having a general YUCK! reaction to the idea of taking it in my waking world.
I finally wake all the way up and wonder about this. Is my dreaming mind telling me, at the very least, that I'm not stimulating my mind enough with new knowledge? Does my dreaming mind have a different agenda for my waking life than my waking mind itself has?! I'll have to experiment with this a little. Maybe this is the reason the recurring dream of being back in school is happening so often to me? Maybe I can study something and see if that helps ... just as long as it's not calculus ....
