I'm back to the vampiric sleep pattern again...up 'till the crack o' dawn then sleep 'till afternoon...you know. Unemployed peoples' behavior.Maybe it's the light penetrating the eyelids or something, I don't know, but for some reason dreams are much more vivid lately.
All dreams fall into certain categories, themes, if you will.
1. Location: Usually dealing with me living in a house or apartment that, in reality, I never did, but in the dream it feels entirely familiar to me. The dwelling usually has many interesting rooms and sometimes can be downright Escher-esque with staircases to nowhere and upside-down rooms. Location dreams can be the backdrop setting for another style dream layered on top of it or, by itself, can be wholly about issues of living there like cleaning, decorating, cooking, sleeping, etc. Fun, huh?
2. Familia: Typically I'll conjure up a dead relative or two and they will be instrumental characters in my dream. In the dream world, they aren't apparitions or ghosts since they never died. And I'm usually a lot closer to them than I was in real life.
3. Cinematic: Like watching a movie in a movie theater, these dreams are usually devoid of my personal interactions (so I'm merely an observer) and can be quite dramatic involving car chases, shootout scenes, you get the picture. They're my favorite because not only are they really entertaining, but I have a feeling that if I could only wake up with enough of the story intact in my memory, I'd have a very successful screenplay on my hands.
4. Chaotic: Not really a true theme, per se, it's the result of a dream devolving into a series of vignettes just as I'm starting to wake up. So they end up being disconnected tangents like dirty sneakers eating a 1970's style rotary dial phone while swimming across the English Channel.
The dream I just woke from featured me living in an upstairs apartment in an old brick tenement in Hell's Kitchen in New York. The landlady, who quickly morphed into my paternal grandmother, rented it to me on the condition that she live in the apartment with me. She also owned an Irish pub on the first floor.
Eventually, I got tired of her living with me, playing Lawrence Welk music on the radio and watching every little thing I did, so I moved out. As I was leaving, she needed a ride to her babysitting gig and so I dropped her off there. She greeted the kids and sat on the sofa in their house. I watched in amazement as a wingless black wasp the size of a house cat crawled out of a hole in the living room floor and stung an equally huge ant. The kids and my grandmother just watched calmly, smiling.
Then I woke up.