A Break, For a Dream

My birds were being so loud for so long that I had to take an Ativan. Sheesh. Now I have headphones on so as to gain some control over what noise I’m exposed to. It reminded me of my dream this morning. The dream seemed important so I want to make a record of it. You can probably just skip this unless you’re a voyeur on some level (no, there was no sex, at least not in this dream).

I sometimes dream of celebrities. Most dreams with celebrities in them are much more linear than my purely symbolic dreams, and this lends them an air of realism that invariably sets me to pondering. Most of these dreams also come completely unbidden by anything I can come up with; for example, I’ll dream of someone I have zero interest in and haven’t thought of in years. Some of the dreams are very mundane, like being at a basketball game. Others are much more “other universe” looking.

My favorite celebrity dreams are two dreams I had of Johnny Depp. Johnny Depp is someone I didn’t invest anything in until these dreams occurred, though I like a lot of his movies. I was never a real fan, though, in the usual sense. Just a member of the audience on occasion. So these dreams struck me as interesting for that reason, but they struck me even more intensely for another reason – these two dreams of Johnny Depp are also the only dreams in which I have ever performed ritual.

In the first one, I was at a party in a building I’d never seen before. I have so many recurring dream locations that I’m working on a database in my alleged spare time, but this place was new. It might have resembled something like a frat house, based on what I’ve seen in movies. It had a large central hall and other areas branching out from these. There were a lot of people milling around. Here, here’s a quick sketch:

Okay, the top room with the big star in it is where the ritual took place. The room just below, the one like a crossbar, is where the witnesses to the ritual were. They were still mingling, drinking, doing their thing while it was going on. The “Darker here” area is where the dream began, I think. It’s been a while. The first thing I remember is becoming aware of myself at this party. I was lying on some big mass of softness – I don’t know if it was a pile of “dirty laundry” (ha ha), a weird bed, everyone’s jackets, or what. But I was lying there with Johnny Depp. I knew instantly that he was there with his then-girlfriend (now wife) and she was aware of our hanky panky in this not-so-private area and was fine with it. Yeah, dream on. I was confused as to my presence there, in flagrante, and at the same time it felt perfectly natural. Apparently, I’d entered the dream too late and missed the action portion of our program. Drat.

Anyway, we’re hanging out (in every sense of the word), no one’s bothering us, when he suddenly realizes that some stupid dabblers in the occult have performed some sort of Necronomicon style ritual meant to summon one of the Old Ones, and that odds are in favor of people suddenly being consumed messily by an enormous slavering beast in the near future. So he recruits me to help him put a stop to it.

We get up, and evidently our clothes decide to reappear since I don’t recall putting them back on, we go into the room and he starts expressing his opinion of the ritual event (still in progress), using his best sardonic, not quite sarcastic voice. Not Jack Sparrow, but in the same neighborhood. He’s clearly restraining himself, too, and I think the recipients of his lecture got this immediately. So they paused.

Meanwhile, everyone in the room has gone quiet to watch, and I’m working my way through the little cliques of people passing out post-it-note sized pieces of paper with a whisper to each person I gave one to. There were 11, including me and Johnny. By the time I get to the “staging area,” he’s got everyone out of the way and is beginning an impromptu setup for a ritual designed to send Nyarlathotep (or whomever) back to hell (or wherever). I realize what he’s setting up for, and pitch in to help as the other 9 people make their way to the space.

What follows is a strange and, for me, unheard of rite based on the ten sephiroth of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. The details are sketchy now, but I know that there was a person standing in the location of each sephirah, and then there was Johnny, who did some sort of literal pathwalking. I seem to recall at least one of the sephirah-standers putting on a hat with a star or some other symbol on the top of it. Based on my position, I was either Binah or Netzach, depending on the orientation of the Tree (which I can’t remember). Johnny did his mojo walk, muttering stuff at us, at the universe at times, and at other times performing something closer to the usual vibrating. Around the time he was wrapping things up, Nyarlathotep showed up and tore the roof off the place.

We held our ground while he shouted stuff and made various gestures (or godforms?), and Nyarlathotep backed off. Johnny Depp, you’re my hero. lol. I’m reminded now of the Kraken from the second Pirates movie, but this was before that movie came out. And this time, no one was swallowed. Also, Nyarlathotep? A wee bit bigger than the Kraken. Yeah.

My other Depp dream was weird too, and had to do with a contest for composing a ritual. The winner of the contest won a dragon egg. I won, but the dragon eggs were gone, so Johnny was delivering it himself. I woke up before he got there, though. (This dream was quite a while back too, so no, I didn’t know about Dragon Cave at the time.) The one difference is that I’ve been back to the location where the contest was held on at least two occasions since then, in my dreams.

This leads me to this morning. In another new location for my database, I found myself in a cave. It’s a very large cave as far as single caves go, based on my rather limited experience. It had opening toward a body of water, so there was a sort of lagoon inside the cave. We even called it the lagoon. The other end of the cave was how we entered and exited, but that’s more confusing because it was supposed to be a secret place, and yet when I looked that direction I saw the backs of houses, as if this were just beyond everyone’s back yards. Sort of like playing in the woods when we were kids, only it was a cave. Moving on.

This dream, in case you didn’t guess already, also starred a celebrity. The “star” of this dream was Eddie Vedder. I’ve dreamt of Eddie a couple of times, but they were so long ago I couldn’t tell you what they were about anymore. It would’ve been early to mid 90s. Eddie used to feel significant to me, but in a quiet way that never prompted me to seek him out at all, even when I lived in Seattle for four years during the grunge heyday. I’m the last one to intrude upon someone’s life, but the point is I never even went to see Pearl Jam play. Okay then, moving on again.

In the dream, there was that bond, the bond you have with someone you really care about but with whom you’ve never made any sort of commitment, mostly because you aren’t sure it’s the thing to do, so you’re waiting to see. We had a relationship that felt complicated enough without bringing in definitions and expectations. So, we’re in the cave, and there are at least half a dozen of us. Everyone skirts around the edges of the walls where there’s fallen rock, etc, rather than crossing over water because the water is deep, right? This is a known fact, and somehow no one’s ever questioned it or, evidently, gone into the water to see. (Water is a very frequent element in my dreams; yes, I know what it means.)

The dream is full of laughter and fun and so on, and then toward the end of it, I’m rolling around in the water’s edge with Eddie. I feel very alive, and it makes me brave. I start to walk to the center of the lagoon and he yells for me to stop, don’t go there. I keep going, and I say something like, “It just seems so funny to me that no one ever thinks to question this… because as I can demonstrate, this water is shallow.” I walk to the center of the lagoon and the water is no more than knee deep. I stand there, vindicated in my discovery (no clue when I found out this detail but I knew before I walked to it). Everyone is silent and looking at me, astonished.

Eddie looks really fucking horrified, as if he’s going through some metamorphosis of betrayal and anger and pain, and he walks out to me and stands there. He looks up at the ceiling, and he sees a grate (don’t ask me what a grate is doing in a cave) like for an air conditioner, and up into the grate there is clearly a camera. Our whole time in this room is being monitored. He freaks completely out and leaves hastily, with me running to catch up. He’s talking back toward me as he walks quickly through the yards, heading for his car at the street. “I can’t believe they’ve been watching us. That is it. That’s the very last straw. I’m gone.” And I’m hollering for him to wait, don’t go, don’t leave without me. Then I realize: If I go with him, I am abdicating my responsibility to my little brother and to all the things I’m expected to do. I stop running after him, torn, agonized. I don’t know what to do.

That very second there was a big crash when one of my cats knocked something to the floor, waking me up. I’ve been pondering this dream off and on all day, seeking understanding. I know the obvious points: Perceived depth is often illusion, most people don’t want to see shallowness, even when it’s there… No idea what the camera means, except implied judgment or mistrust… and the last bit, the dilemma, oh that’s crystal clear. It’s a sticking point in therapy, to stop responding out of guilt, to assert my rights or needs, not to be manipulated into settling because it’s the responsible thing to do, etc. I just don’t know what to do with the information. I’m as stuck here as I was in that dream.

Tweet