Dream Journal

Context: I've been watching Jamie's soccer games a lot recently.

I’m at Jamie’s soccer game, sitting on the sidelines, watching. Each team has 7-11 players on the field. I look around and it’s a big green area, with some rolling hills and trees. I comment to Rebecca that the area looks like it could be a Renaissance Festival at other times. I ask myself, “Why do I think this?” and I see there are tall structures shaped like Quidditch stands (but smaller and brown) in a line at the side of the green up the hill, and, turning the other way, I see this large building that has an old English style to it. At this point my wake-up alarm goes off. I wake up and set it for 13 minutes, then I go right back to sleep.

The effect of this on my dream is that I’m back watching the soccer game, except the entire soccer field is now encased in the space of an invisible room — my bedroom. The green grass and hills continue beyond it, but everything on the field is bounded by this room and much reduced in size. There’s a bed along the side of the field. At first, it’s blocking the far half of the field. But as I look around, trying to figure this out, I find the bed is then to my right. Now there are two identical beds. They’re about the size of my bed — queen size, but with the pink & yellow patterned sheets of my childhood.

There’s not enough room for the full soccer game. It’s Jamie and another kid in blue playing against two much younger kids in pink. Their uniforms seem more like fuzzy onesies. Jamie slams a goal home, and I watch him take the ball to the center line and start it up again, scoring easily against the younger kids. I wonder what the score is, and I look at my phone. It’s 12-13. That didn’t seem right, considering the teams. I wonder where the other players went and see them standing along the sidelines at or outside the boundaries of the room, talking amongst themselves, uninterested in the game.

This game seems silly, and I feel tired. I walk over to the bed on the far side of the room and get in. There’s another little girl napping in there, and I crawl in to the center of the bed. For a moment I wonder if this is something I shouldn’t do — getting into a bed when there’s a little girl sleeping there.. but I stay and snooze.

Then I remember leaving the soccer field and going down a road. This is in the direction of the hallway outside my bedroom door. I go down the street perpendicular to the soccer field two blocks, looking at the houses and trees, then turn right. At this point, I need to park my car, so I make a U-turn and into a parking spot at the side of the street. Someone pulls in behind me. It’s a middle-aged woman with short red hair. She recognizes me and greets me, and asks if here for another . . . something. I don’t recognize her, and say I was here for a soccer game. Then I notice her uniform and the building across the street and remember her. She works at this physical therapy or medical place I go to sometimes.

I cross the street to this place that feels like a restaurant or cafe, but there’s no food. It’s more like a gathering place. It’s a small building made out of stone-and-mortar. There was an inside area but the other half had no roof, and there were stairs to an upper area. I went in and sat down at a long table in the enclosed area. I was here for a while, and I felt like I knew a bunch of the people there. I talked with various people. At one point I asked myself, “Am I lucid? Do I know this is a dream? Of course!” Then this girl showed up and sat down across from me. I recognized her in the dream and said an excited “hello!” We talked, then I decided I wanted to fly. I invited her outside. On the far side of the restaurant was a beach on a lake. There were lots of people out there talking, and some in the water. I started jumping, large jumps, slowing down on the way down by turning my body sideways. After a few attempts, I got it, and floated through the air out over the water and around a swimmer. There were sounds of surprise and delight from some of the people on the shore. I did this for a little while, then returned to the restaurant.

I’m walking around the roofless part of the restaurant. I’m trying to find some evidence that I can bring back when I wake up. I’m looking at the weather report on my phone, hoping to see if any storms are coming, and then I can compare that to the real weather report (what a weird idea of proof) when I wake up, but I can’t get the app to show me. Then I try to zero in on the high/low temperature of the day, and I see this confusing graph, and try to read the numbers but it’s not working. It seems like this is almost a regular dream behavior — this idea of trying to get proof. It feels like a habit, not like it was my waking self having an original idea.

There are a couple people like waiters managing the place. I go up the first set of stone stairs. They’re collecting the baby snakes that they keep finding. This comes from an earlier dream, or a dream from a different night. These baby snakes are a wide variety of snakes, including a white one I called “needle snakes” because they had regular needle-like protrusions coming off their sides, almost like legs. I got distracted by these snakes, which were all over the landing area. I thought about bringing one (not a needle snake!) along with me, putting it in my pocket. This resulted in something like a back and forth between my waking self and dream self. The waking self had this (odd) desire, but then my dream self told me I wouldn’t be able to bring it with me . . . to the waking world? Was that my intention?

Then Rebecca woke me up, saying my alarm didn’t go off and she was about to take Holly to school.

To remember this, I stayed in bed after Rebecca woke me up. At first I just remembered one scene.. then another came to me, and then more.. and I stayed in each a moment as more details came back.

References: Quidditch is a sport in Harry Potter.