Wholly Schmidt!

Last night I dreamt of dinosaurs, but what was odd was that I’d never realized this before: I have recurring dinosaur dreams.

The specifics don’t seem to be a constant, but the feeling of the dream is roughly the same. It’s nothing totally outrageous, I’m not riding bicycles with dinosaurs through downtown Berlin in the middle of a pudding festival or anything that surreal. I’m usually with a few other people in some fairly straightforward situation: We need to get away from some dinosaurs that are trying to eat us.

What I remember most vividly is that there’s never a real sense of danger, just a sense of weary resignation that I’m being forced to fight my way through dinosaurs again. Things get a little fuzzy here, but I think in many of the dreams I actually go through the scenario twice. For example, I’ll be trapped in a house with a friend with two velociraptors outside trying to get in. There will be some running, some sneaking, some trickery, and often some kicking dinosaurs in the head. We’ll escape to safety, but then later in the dream, I’ll find myself back in the exact same situation. The sensation is hard to explain, but it feels like I’ve been tricked into repeating some kind of performance.

Nothing has to make sense in dreams, which makes this hard to write about. I keep wanting to assign rational justifications for vague memories of feelings from the dream when my waking explanations probably have nothing to do with the events. I mentioned kicking dinosaurs in the head. The dinosaurs are never actually any more dangerous than an angry stray dog. In the dream, I can know that, but at the same time still associate the dinosaurs with the terrifyingly lethal creatures straight out of Jurassic Park. In the same way, when facing the dinosaurs for the second time (or what feels like a second time), I know without a doubt that I will get through this, but I still totally dread it, feeling simultaneous danger and a surety of outcome with the conflict of those feelings never occurring to me till I’m awake.

The sense of repetition isn’t always explained either. In last night’s case, I remember pretty clearly escaping from a Tyrannosaurus Rex once and then being put back in the situation a second time (I think I started waking and losing the dream, or at least memory of it, before the second scenario resolved). Sometimes, I think the first time I’m dealing with the dinos already feels like an encore. There’s no way of knowing why; I don’t know if the dream automatically evokes that sense, if I’m remembering previous dreams, or if I’m simply failing to remember earlier parts of dreams from the same night.

They’re strange dreams, and I don’t have any real conclusion to draw here, but maybe by thinking through this and writing it down I’ll do better at remembering details or circumstances in the future.