What Dreams May Come

I've had occasion to make note here in the past of the mundane quality of my dreams - those that I recall, that is. I suppose that in some vague way I consider myself an imaginative sort of cove. After all, I teach Literature which if it's about anything is concerned with the workings of imagination, and I sometimes direct plays, an activity which would seem to demand some kind of imaginative output. Yet my infrequent dreams are pretty much uniformly ordinary to the point that they can seem like tepid replays of a rather tepid life.

With one exception, which I experienced in the early hours of this morning: around 09.00. I woke up genuinely shaken from a dream featuring at least two massive aircraft crashing in the distance ahead of me, followed by various rocks, or blocks of something like concrete rather, hurtling down from the sky with me below skipping around hoping to avoid them. It was all very apocalyptic and even as it was happening I had an awareness that I've experienced this before in dreamland.

I suppose it's a kind of anxiety dream, though I'm not exactly sure why I feel anxious about aircraft landing on my head. And it's really quite spectacular. But I'm also aware it's very derivative of disaster movies and the like, so even in this respect I seem cursed with a lack of individually creative imagination. The most worrying feature of all is just how much of a coward I am in these dreams. I never feel the slightest concern for anyone around me, though there are others with me, in the sense of an anonymous crowd. I'm entirely focused on self-preservation. So it's all very down-heartening, despite the special effects.