Dream Journal
July 22, 1997
Rebecca and I are living on the top floor/attic of this new house. We’re so in love and hanging out with so many friends. It’s a nice house, too, and the area is naturally beautiful. It’s probably a higher realm. We have an entirely new network of friends. There’s this middle-eastern girl, a friend of a friend, who asks me for a ride home and I say okay. I’m flying her over a sea in a plane and she’s telling me how good I was last night in bed. I remember absolutely nothing of this but my first instinct is to accept it as true and try to remember. I work hard at this and begin to remember the previous night bit by bit. There doesn’t seem room for this to have happened and I can come up with so many reasons why I would never do it and why, if I did, I would remember it.
Then I crashed the plane or we jumped out. We fell rapidly to the ocean. We swam to shore and I found a boat. I began to paddle it with the girl in the back. Chris H was floating toward us across the waves, above the water and then he was in the boat. Here I told him about the plane crash, but I remembered it as huge taut ropes across the bay which we were walking on and I just lost my balance. So we have a layered memory there. It’s stacked and seems parallel or equivalent from a different perspective. Perhaps I remember the essence of the experience and translated it into a different context each time?
We ended back on the near shore again. I remembered the final missing moments of “last night” which proved that nothing happened and I angrily told the girl off. I thought I must have been drinking and that’s why I had such trouble remembering. I told her she lied and I have a wonderful girlfriend and would never cheat on her and wasn’t even slightly attracted to her. She seemed hit pretty hard but she deserved it, I thought. I got in this very small van with Rafe and some other close friends and we drove back to our place. Rebecca wouldn’t talk to me (I remembered earlier not telling her where I was going) and I followed her up to her room and she wouldn’t even look at me. I started reading notes to her from what had “not happened” and she called me a “sleaze dealer.” I kept trying to explain.
Dream Memory: I finally succeeded in not falling into another’s idea of who I was. The middle-eastern girl probably was projecting the image of someone else onto me. I had to go through tremendous effort to discern whether or not this event had occurred. I finally managed to do it without going into a fantasy memory and avoided a huge guilt-scene. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize that she was mistaking me for someone else and I let her have it.
Double Context: The true dream event is that I was flying the girl home and then landed in the sea. The first imagined context (rationalization) was that I was flying in a plane and crashed it. When retelling the story, the essence of it was the same — I was up high and fell — but this time it was walking on the taut ropes and lost my balance.
Along Comes a Friend: Chris H. must have thought of me, and I see him fast traveling towards me, above the waves. Then he’s in the boat, without having to climb aboard.