Geographic Dreams

I don’t know how you dream, but in my dreams, I almost always think like a complete dunce (the character of Patrick Starfish in SpongeBob SquarePants comes to mind). When I do wake up from a dream, I will often want to kick myself for acting so stupidly within the dream! I think that this is largely due to my lack of critical ability within the dream state. But this is not always the case. There is a certain kind of dream I have from time to time that somehow seems to make such an impact on me that I unconsciously have incorporated it into my “reality” memory: the geographic dream.

In eastern Gainesville, just on the other side of Main Street around a place called the Thomas Center, is a compact theme park with several rides, especially of the roller coaster variety. North of this park lies a vast area of concentrated, old apartment buildings some of which are abandoned. And there are railroad tracks running around this area. I have gone on several of the rides in the park, and I would have to say that, as far as theme parks are concerned, it ranks right up there at the top (especially since the lines are so short). But the catch is this: none of this is real! The theme park, apartments, and railroad tracks only exist in my dreams, and by “dreams”, I mean that I have dreamed of this place a number of times!

There is a solid wall in the building where I work that, in an earlier dream, connected to a library with a large sitting area. I sat in that place once, reading a book in Finnish (and understanding it). Now, whenever I walk past that wall during work, I think about that curious dream. By the way, I don't know any Finnish.

In the formerly undeveloped Everglades wilderness southwest of Hollywood, there is a back-winding road out in the middle of nowhere on which stands an all-night restaurant that I’ve eaten at (but only in my dreams). There is a special waterway running north-south through Fort Lauderdale that I’ve swum down, and which has a little pastry shop on the side (the best-tasting pastry ever), but once again, this is a figment of my dreams. There are specific real spots where, when I am dreaming, I can actually lift off of the ground and fly (out along the north side of my old Hollywood home and in the middle of the road directly in front of my current home). Recently, I took off with my family in a plane that was camouflaged as the second floor of an old house near the Office Depot on US 441 in Gainesville. I sat in a comfortable recliner, strapped on my seat belt, and the second floor took off! The pilot decided to go through a few loops over Gainesville, to which I whooped and hollered in delight! I could go on and on with dream experiences of this type.

I’m sure that you, too, can probably dig up your own dream experiences as they relate to real places. Those that I mentioned of my own experiences were just among the ones that I most clearly remembered upon awakening. I wonder how much of our feelings about our waking, real world are influenced by unconscious associations from unremembered-but-latent dreams. After all, we are all a mix of the rational and irrational. And sometimes we may get a feeling about a place that we can’t explain the reasons for. Perhaps this says something about my psychological makeup, but dreams about geography and travel have always been the most memorable and meaningful for me.