I dreamed that two of my cats were in the Kitty Survivor show, and because I was half away as I was dreaming it, I didn't realize that it wasn't true until I had been awake for awhile.

Has that ever happened to you?

-- Kymm Zuckert (hedgehog@hedgehog.net), August 11, 2000

Answers

This is an excerpt from my journal entry of Feb 23, 1998.:

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Had a strange dream the other night. I was cleaning the office at home and found a ream of printed out email messages in the recycling bin. Reading them, I found they were hardcopy of email messages our cat Finnegan had been sending to cats at his former place of residence. It turned out he had been raised in a California laboratory and had a scientifically enhanced intellect. Finnegan was fully capable of using our computer, although as he put it in one of his messages "It takes some effort to manipulate the mouse." He said in his messages that he was enjoying living in Canada and was quite happy with his new humans, Lisa and Ron. "I am residing with three other cats. Abby and Megan are normal females, who can have a temper if pressed too hard. Sam, I fear, is quite gay. I come to this conclusion by the fact that he keeps jumping on my and trying to bite the nape of my neck. Still, all in all, a right old fellow."

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Even stranger was the dream I had later that year, in advance of my high school reunion. I recalled it in my Mar 3, '98 journal entry:

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An interesting night of dreaming last night. It felt as if I was sleeping in reverse, with the most vivid dreams occuring early. I woke just after 1am from a long and _interesting_ dream about the upcoming high school reunion the St. Catharines Collegiate is having.

It was evening and I entered the school. For the first part of the dream I was walking the actual corridors and auditorium in normal lighting. Things quickly changed after I turned one corner and went down a flight of stairs. The corridors were set at odd angles to each other, and poorly lit - almost in a black light setting. The classrooms were set up with different themes representing the decades of existance for the school. There were open loggias where the corridors met with cheap folding tables upon which bottles of expensive Niagara red and white wine stood. I recall refilling my glass of red wine at every station as I wandered to and fro. Every time I did, the amount of wine remaining grew smaller and smaller.

After passing some clusters of individuals whose faces I remember I entered the auditorium. This was located in a central location where all corridors eventually met. The auditorium was set at a steep angle and triangular shaped, with the stage far below at the point. I mingled with different people, noticing that the same cliques formed as they did 15 years ago. The jocks, the preppies, the bullies, the theatre people, the choir - all in their own social circles and peering down their noses at you as you passed.

The variety show began, celebrating the storied history of the school. I don't recall exactly how it started, but at one point one of the teachers at the school I presently work at got up and began to sing a song. In the dream he was an alumnus of the Collegiate who had become a singing star in Asia. The next sequence of events took place. In this dream scenario, I was actually a somewhat famous comedic actor of stage and screen. With the spotlights swirling and mayfair dancers twirling on the steps of the auditorium amongst long banners that hung from the high ceiling, I made my entrance. Slides were set up on the stairs. I came through the main doors of the auditorium and waited in the foyer for my musical cue. When it happened, I came yelling and screaming to the top of the stairs and took a prat fall down the slide that covered them. On my way to the bottom, I passed through the banners and tore them down, spilling the mayfair dancers in the process. Apparently, I was recreating a scene from my most famous production.

At this point, the auditorium and school changed back to normal. I jumped onto the stage, ran up the backstage stairs past the techie control room to the 'lounge' the tech club had. (The tech club consisted of students who did lighting and sound for events in the auditorium - I had been a member when I was in high school.) From there I climbed a ladder to the attic above the auditorium. I walked the wooden planks that crossed the thin stucco ceiling to a hatch door that opened onto the roof of the school.

I re-entered the building and started down the stairs. The school changed back to the poorly lit odd angles. I made my way to the post-production reception dinner and dance, which was being held in the auditorium, only now all the seats were gone and it was more level. I met up with Lisa (my wife), her sister Tara, Tara's boyfriend Greg, and their mom and step-dad Joanne & Mike. We stood around and chewed the fat for a few minutes. The room grew lighter; windows appeared along the walls and tables full of food were set up everywhere. The auditorium had transformed into the dining hall. We wandered about the dining hall and ran into Lisa's childhood friend and her entire family. There was a big reunion scene, complete with hugs and kisses and sniffling and tears.

I sensed something strange, evil perhaps, lurking about elsewhere in the school. I made my excuses about having to refresh my drink and headed out into the corridors. They were again very dark and at odd angles. I had changed from being a celebrity to a psychic 'hunter' for want of a better term. Kolchak the Night Stalker, in a sense. I went to each loggia, looking for some red wine to refill my glass with, but every bottle was empty. There was an unintelligible whispering in my head as I continued on. I began to go into different rooms, and encountered clusters of alumni engaged in strange rituals and activities. Some were in orgies, others practising ceremonies, some were playing loud metal and drinking cases of beer.

I began to run down the corridors, chasing the evil spirit. I could sense I was closing on it. I rounded one corner and I was suddenly out of the darkness. It was the main foyer and well lit. There was conversation from people seated at round tables, all near a bar built into the foyer. When someone left their barstool, I took it and had a seat. In the dream, I knew the bartender and was quite chummy with her. I ordered a Guiness draft; blew the foam off and took a drink.

At this point I awoke, thanks in part to Sam digging on the wicker waste basket. It took me a while to get back to sleep, because my mind was racing.

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The one thing about the above dream that was true, come reunion time, was that there were classrooms set up to represent the different decades.

Sorry for such a long-winded read!

-- Ron Collings (dragon@crescentschool.org), August 11, 2000.

I think I told you about this already, but I dreamed about Rodney Breen a couple of nights ago. But I knew it wasn't real immediately upon waking up. In fact, I think I even knew during the dream.

-- Sara Astruc (astruc@astruc.com), August 11, 2000.

I've dreamt that it was time to get up, so I got up, slapped the alarm clock, went downstairs, made coffee, had breakfast, went into the computer room, and sat and stared at the little clock on the task bar saying "2:47"... huh... must have had a power failure (apparently I didn't have enough coffee to realize that the clock on the computer doesn't get thrown off by power failures). Check the battery-powered clocks. Huh. They're all off, too. What the hell? Go check my alarm clock. It's off, too. Hey, and it's still real dark outside. Around this time it starts to sink in... but now the coffee's working and I can't get back to sleep...

-- Colin (ethilrist@prodigy.net), August 11, 2000.

I had a dream when I was 17 that I was told I had 6 months to live. Although I knew it was a dream, I was convinced it was prophetic and true, and obsessed about it. Here I am 12 years later...

I have had a lot of dreams more recently about my ex dying. She was extremely suicidal while we were together and told me more than once that she planned to kill herself in June of this year. Since June, I've repeatedly dreamed that she was dying, just out of reach, that I couldn't save her. Again, while I recognized it was a dream, in each case I profoundly felt that she was *really* dying or dead. About a month ago I found out that she is, in fact, quite alive. The dreams have stopped but I'm still concerned for her.

And I can't contact her... She had asked me to not contact her, if I really loved her. The hardest thing I've ever had to do, abandoning my heart as an act of love. I'm relieved that she's got other people who care about her, whose presence in her life is less troubling.

I thought of this the other day actually, in response to your forum question about love. I do believe in love, but as these words may show, it can bring the greatest and most unbearable pain. Still, I wouldn't trade it for never having known what it is to love someone completely.

-- Tynan (tynan@proactivebliss.net), August 11, 2000.

I often dream that I've written something in my journal, and then I'm very annoyed when I wake up and find I haven't!

Because I'm sure the dream writing is much better than the things I actually do write....

-- Dorothy Rothschild (dorothyr@spies.com), August 11, 2000.

I would say 75% of my dreams are very vivid and realistic and hard to come out of when I wake up. I do the blank stare at Jeffrey usually, because I'm still processing whether what just 'Happened", happened. The other 25% are dreams I'm fully aware that it's all a dream, either from the beginning, or part way through.

Two of the most memorable were these: In the dream my mother and father were fighting, and then they divorced, and then my mother ended up in a screaming match with me. In the dream, I paused in the fight, because the phone was ringing. The phone was ringing IRL, which is why it first entered my dream, and then woke me up. When I answered the phone , half stunned, it was my Mum calling me. It took concentration to get through that call.

The next dream, I dreamt I woke up, went through my morning routine, toilet, shower, eat breakfast and just as I got to my front door, I woke up. So, I went through the whole routine as before, this time it showed as later on the clock, so the routine was a little more frantic, and I got into my car, and woke up. It was now 9:00a.m., I was supposed to be at work, I pelted through the routine, ate breakfast in the car, got into work, worked for a couple of hours, and then Woke Up. At which point I sat shaking my head, trying to work out if I was awake for real or still asleep. This time, it was the real, but it was only 6:30 in the morning. I often have a variation of this dream that does actually have me going through the routine but waking up to find that I've done a serious oversleep.

My sleeping brain pulls in all the sounds and happenings around it and throws them into the dream, sometimes literally, sometimes metaphorically, so when I wake up, this stuff actually happened, like the show is on the TV< or Jeff's come wandering through or there've been sirens and whatnot, and because it's been in a dream that I know is a dream, it's then difficult to place the events back into fact

Dreams they complicate my life (Dreams they complement my life)

An old R.E.M. song called "get Up" that resonates.

-- Amanda Page (amanda@amandasprecipice.com), August 11, 2000.

once when i was a kid, and my birthday was coming up, i dreamed that my mother bought a box of an organic cake mix, lemon flavor, to make my birthday cake. a silly, sort of pointless dream, but it was so realiatic that the next morning i looked in the pantry just to make certain that she hadn't. i think i would still recognize the box if i ever saw one in reality. and i did have her make me a lemon cake for my birthday that year, though it wasn't organic.

-- nicole (nicolemrw@go.com), August 11, 2000.

It happened just last night! Husband and I just moved into a new apartment. It has three levels and typically the top is too hot, the bottom is too cold and the middle is (you guessed it!) just right. Last night I dreamt I found a control on the bottom floor with "Lower Level Temperature" on it. It was set 15 degrees colder than "Upper Level Temperature". When I woke up this morning I was so relieved that I could fix it. It was several minutes later when I realized I'd dreamt it. Very sad.

-- Amanda (missdufour@hotmail.com), August 11, 2000.

It happens to me after important auditions.

There's nothing more depressing than waking up, erroneously thinking I'm employed again...

-- anne (annegrrl@chickmail.com), August 11, 2000.

O this is so funny, I just came home and told the Kitty Survivor story to Cynthia and Fran, and Fran said "I can go you one better! I sometimes dream that I'm still married to my first wife! And I think 'O no, how am I going to explain where I've been for the past six years!' and then I wake up and look around and think 'Thank God!'"

-- Kymm Zuckert (kymmz1@yahoo.com), August 11, 2000.

I had a dream the other day that my husband and I were going to have a new baby, so we had to pick out one of many large, multicolored geckos to decide what kind of baby we would have. The doctors were going to attach the fetus to the gecko so that they could clone it, and then we would have a gecko baby. My husband picked out a bright blue one, and it was very slick, and it seemed like it glowed under blacklights.

I woke up very upset because I didn't want a baby, OR a gecko, and it took a few minutes for me to realize that it was a dream. The first thing I said to Jason was, "I don't WANT a gecko!"

-- Saundra (headspace@anywherebeyond.com), August 12, 2000.

Not to be confused with Geico!

-- Kymm Zuckert (kymmz1@yahoo.com), August 12, 2000.

When I was 9 or so, I dreamed that a segment on "That's Incredible" dealt with Grandpa Walton. He had died and they kind of hung his body on the front porch of the Walton house--with his legs hooked over the railing, so he was sorta dangling there--and to bury him, they simply flipped his legs off the railing and he was gone. Obviously this was just a rather disturbing dream, but for years and years I wasn't sure. "Did I see that on 'That's Incredible'? Or did I dream it? Or should I watch some more crap TV?"

-- Amy Lester (amy@petdance.com), August 15, 2000.

Ron, from way up there at the top:

I laughed until I cried at your first dream. Something about a cat using the word "manipulate" just set me off.

Yes, I'm a dork.

-- Robyn (robyn@hiwaay.net), August 16, 2000.

when i was a kid, we had as many as fourteen cats at one time. they mostly stayed outside, but could come in and "visit." i dreamed that one of the kittens had been playing in the kitchen, had gotten up to the sink and had been washed down the drain. when i woke up, i had a vague feeling that something was not right about my recollection that one of the cats had gone down the drain, but it did seem like something that had actually happened. it occurred to me that it might be a dream, but as i couldn't just walk up to someone and ask, since i would either seem crazy for forgetting such a tragic event or for thinking it could have actually happened, i spent most of the morning trying to hang around noncomittally, vaguely alluding to cats and so on in an attempt to seem casual while finding out for sure whether one of our cats was now in the sewer.

-- cynthia granville (creekread@aol.com), August 25, 2000.

Cynthia! What the hell are you doing on my forum? How funny.

-- Kymm Zuckert (kymmz1@yahoo.com), August 25, 2000.

certain australian aboriginal tribes traditionally belived that dreams wer reality and that awake time was the the illusion

-- Ray Watkins (rayadj67@hotmail.com), January 16, 2002.