The dream:
The Reportage
I woke inside a dream, and I was a child again in my family home.
I found I could recall details I hadn’t thought about in more than fifty years. There I was, exploring the empty lot right beside our house. I’d had dirt-clod fights in that lot and jumped my bike off the ramps we built there. Years later someone built a house on it, but I can still remember what the lot looked like before. The people who moved in were a single mother, Cheryl Price, and her son, Jason.
What strikes me is that I can now often go back to an early childhood memory in a dream and keep exploring that vague memory while the dream is still going. I often wonder why these memories have so few people in them. Usually I’m the only one there, both participant and observer, and while I’m dreaming my mind asks itself why that is.
I also think about my father, who lived in that house from the time he bought it while he was in the Navy until he died. I have so many questions about what he saw over a lifetime on that small patch of land at the top of a hill.
Still, if I’m honest, most of my attention goes to my own observations, and to memories I question. In these dream memories I’m nearly always the only person there and the main character. The dreams send me on a lonely search to understand them, and since I keep coming back to them, they must mean something.
From my studies, I’ve found that these dreams help a great deal with the analysis and interpretation I use to understand the world around me.
Along with the empty dirt lot, I remember an old car dealership fairly close to our home: Pearson Ford, on Fairmount Avenue in San Diego. I can still hear the old radio ads with their slogan: “See Pearson Ford. They stand alone at Fairmount and El Cajon.”
Then the idea finally hit home. In a dream, I can rebuild memories that are woven together and check whether they’re accurate. I have to allow for confabulation, but I also try to recall some of the things that were influencing me back then.
What became clear was that the dream isn’t really a record of facts from my life. It projects me back into the person I used to be. I watch that dream self, predict how he’ll handle the dream as it happens, and try to remember what it felt like to be that younger child working through whatever problem the dream gives him.
You could call it metacognition inside a dream: thinking about my own thinking, watched as it happens, in conditions from more than fifty-five years ago. When you think about it, that’s a fascinating vantage point.
I suppose that’s just how my mind works, because this has become almost routine when I dream these days.
I’m fascinated by what I find, and the clarity of those years comes flooding back. But the memories need more feedback and input, such as my brothers’ experiences from those years. Their accounts could help confirm what I remember and remove as much confabulation as possible, along with the false impressions the dream adds to what really happened all those years ago.
This process I seem to be developing deserves more exploration. It gives me a strong reason to use my imagination and to put it into my writing. I’m not only looking for the truth. I’m also finding new ideas and new ways of seeing myself that I’d never considered.
Here’s an example. In one dream I was very young, maybe five, and I felt again the fear of climbing a tall diving platform above a huge public pool. It was like the municipal pool in my memory, which may have been in Balboa Park. The dream rebuilt the moment: I was willing to try the climb, and I was thrilled, excited and even afraid of going that high to make the dive. That event really happened, though I know I was much older than five. Even so, I relived how I must have felt as a kid, and I could look at it again on the level of feeling. I was alone at the pool, with nobody I knew to help me. It was just me, put back into a real event so I could ask again how I must have felt.
In these dreams, I live through the recreated events the way I would have back then. My mind looks again at how I react, how I behave, how I feel and what comes to mind the second time around. And when the situation is invented, I can still ask myself how I would have handled it as the person I was fifty years ago. That is where I see the real payoff: exploring remembered feelings that come from remembered behavior, a lifetime ago. Given enough detail from a memory, the dream supplies the context and builds itself around it. Then I can look into that impression and work out how the younger me, the main character of this story, will act.
…
DCG
