Landscapes, Dreams, Insights

I read somewhere that people around the world dream of landscapes.  I don't know if that's generally true, but it's certainly true for me.  The most memorable thing about many of my dreams is their distinctive settings.  I don't hang out in peaceful meadows; I climb steep, scary mountains, and traverse sweeping, exotic terrains (flying across them, in the really fun dreams).  If my dream takes place in town, that town will have a dramatic setting; usually with steep hills and winding valleys.  The buildings and houses are exotic and colorful, and because the place is so hilly, they are stacked almost on top of each other. My dream environments are more like the settings for myths or fairy tales than real places.  But they also seem familiar, because I return to the same places in dream after dream.  This happens enough that I have the sensation there really is a "land of dreams"; that everyone constructs an entire region in their subconscious, and returns to favored places there when they go to sleep.  And I do favor certain kinds of places, whether I'm asleep or awake.

In fact, my dreams and my preferred environments seem to influence each other.  I like places that remind me of my dreams.  I love towns that really do have exotic architecture, colorful houses, and steep, winding streets.  I love broad, jagged landscapes.  The influence also goes in the other direction: if I visit a place that strikes some chord in my subconscious, it may become a landmark in the country of my dreams.  Even if I never go back to the real place, I return to the dream version again and again.  For example, below you can see the street I lived on for a year in St. Johns, Newfoundland, one of the towns where I go in my dreams.  I used to see this view out my living room window every day, and I still dream about that harbor, and those bright little houses marching up steep streets.  Once I woke up and there was a huge iceberg completely blocking the harbor entrance.  Why I don't dream about that, I'll never know.


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Some dream researchers think dreaming about distinctive places serves a purpose.  They suggest we dream about landscapes because it helps our brains make maps of our environment.  I don't know if I believe this or not, because my landscapes don't much resemble the real world.  I dream of places I've never been, and if I dream I'm in a real place, my dream version of it isn't very accurate.  Sometimes it barely resembles the place at all, and it's almost always more vivid and exaggerated.  In any case, it's clear that dreams and landscapes are connected in our minds.  Dreams and learning may be connected, but exactly how is not clear.  I think the relationship between landscapes, dreams, and learning may be a triangular one, because there is also a connection between landscapes and learning.  Many of the lessons I've learned, and the insights I've experienced, are tied to particular landscapes; terrains memorable enough to be folded into my dreams.  Is it that I remember lessons better if I learn them in memorable settings? Or do I have more insights in such settings?  I don't know, but it's probably a bit of both.

In any case, I've lived in several places, many of them quite distinctive, so the lessons I've learned are linked in my mind to those settings.  When I was a sophomore in college, I worried my parents to death by transferring from a small college in Arkansas to the University of New Orleans.  I certainly learned some lessons there; for example, if there are a lot of parking places open on a certain street, it's because people know better than to park there.  Also, do not mess with New Orleans cops.  I learned the second one through observation, luckily.  Another thing I learned in New Orleans was how much I'm child of the hills.  When I was a kid in the Arkansas Ozarks, I went hiking through the woods every chance I got. I loved the beautiful cliffs, streams, and views, but somehow I still took them for granted.  I never realized how important they were to me until I moved to New Orleans; a city not only tabletop flat, but actually below sea level in most places.  What I really missed was being able to see off in the distance, as I could from my parents backyard in Arkansas:

In southeast Louisiana, you're always down among the trees and the buildings, so you can rarely see very far.  I used to go and drive across the big Mississippi River bridges, just to be able to see off in the distance. (I should say that I've learned to appreciate New Orleans in recent years.  See this post, for example.)  After leaving New Orleans, I got back into hiking, something I hadn't done much since I hit my teens and starting thinking standard teenager thoughts.  I also became a little bit obsessed with mountains.  But the biggest mountains I had ever seen were the Appalachians. I wanted to see real mountains, with craggy, snow-capped peaks.  I got my wish the next year, when I spent a summer in Innsbruck, Austria.  Not long after I got there, I set out to climb one of the big mountains just outside of town.  A friend and I took off, with just a little bit of water, and started climbing...and climbing...and climbing.  When we finally got to treeline, we stopped to plot our scramble up the rest of the mountain, and to congratulate ourselves on having almost made it. It looked like just a couple of hundred feet to the top.  Then I noticed some movement in one of the high, nearly vertical meadows near us.  It seemed to be a group of small animals milling around.  Voles? Marmots?  I borrowed my friend's binoculars, took a look, and then took a seat.  They were mountain sheep--animals bigger than me, and they looked like specks against the mountainside.  My whole visual frame of reference shifted, and the mountaintop had instantly grown by a factor of ten.  It wasn't a couple hundred feet to the top; it was a couple thousand.

The mountain was just too big for my brain to process correctly.  My friend and I were thinking we had just enough time to get to the top and get back down before dark, but now we knew we would never make it.  I was actually a little relieved, because I was exhausted (I had also learned that day how hard it is to climb a real mountain).  While we talked about turning back I scanned the slopes, looking for more wildlife, and saw a quick flash of color.  Sweeping the binoculars to catch up with it, I saw a guy on a mountain bike. Hundreds of feet above me.  Here I was, just realizing this mountain had defeated me, and there's a guy way up above me, who peddled a bicycle up there.  I shook my head, and we started downhill.

Austria made me even more obsessed with mountains than I had been before.  When I got back to the states, I was dying to see the Rockies.  I was especially keen to see Montana.  I got both chances a couple of summers later. A friend of mine was going to Montana for the summer, and asked if I wanted to ride out there with her.  We took the long way--straight west from Arkansas to Albuquerque, and then north, following the Rocky Mountains through Colorado and Wyoming.  I didn't expect to be very impressed by New Mexico.  I was wrong.  West of Amarillo, in the high, flat country of the Texas panhandle, I started thinking that the the fabulous western landscapes I had heard about were all a big lie. It was just plains all the way to the California coast, and after all this driving, we were surely almost there.  That's when we came to the edge of the high plains, and my world got bigger again,  The landscape dropped hundreds of feet, giving way to an unbelievable vista of mesas and escarpments, visible for at least a hundred miles into the distance.  I had never seen New Mexico before, and now I was seeing a sizable chunk of it all at once.  And that's not even a particularly impressive place, by western standards.  People talk about the wide open spaces out west, but you can't fathom just how wide they really are until you see them.  It's impossible to capture in a photograph:  I've never seen a picture that does the experience justice.

Once again, I was stunned by the vastness of the world.  I stayed stunned all the way to Montana, which was as beautiful as I had imagined, just....bigger.  I've been stunned by the western United States ever since.  It seems larger than life, like a place for gods or giants.  Whenever I'm out there I always have a vague sense that I'm dreaming, because surely the world doesn't really have such extravagant landscapes.  But it does.

Years later, I lived in Colorado, and never got tired of the wild terrain, and all the fun activities it made possible.  For a while I had a job traveling every day in the Colorado Rockies and northern New Mexico.  I've been pretty much everywhere in that area, and most of it is stunning. The towering mountains in Colorado always made me hum Wagner's Also Sprach Zarathustra, beating imaginary tympani on the steering wheel.  But I was on the road four nights a week, and it got downright lonesome.  Those mountains and vistas were beautiful, but they don't offer much company--another landscape lesson.  The job wasn't very satisfying, either.  Finally, I hit ice on a mountain road with no guard rail.  While spinning 360 degrees, wondering if I was going off the edge, I decided to change careers.  I resolved to go to library school, and started looking around for one that would accept me for immediate enrollment that January.  That turned out to be LSU, back in Louisiana.

Now I work as a librarian in the swamp country in Louisiana. Louisiana doesn't have mountains or vast, craggy deserts, but I've learned to appreciate its other charms: great music, fun people, and interesting plants and animals.  Louisiana has made me slow down and change my focus, noticing the grandeur of small wonders like dragonflies, lizards, and wildflowers.  In fact, living in this landscape has taught me yet another lesson. I may not know all the secrets to happiness, but I know one for sure: appreciate small, everyday wonders, because you can find those anywhere.  Grab a magnifying glass and head for the back yard.  You'll find something that amazes you.  It's a good thing to have learned.  But I still get out west every chance I get, out to the country of my dreams.

Dream Themes

I came home from work feeling like I'm getting a cold.  I crashed on the couch at 6:30, and then woke up at 11:30.  Since I was (and am) half-awake, I thought I would read a part of a book about dreams.  I just read a chapter about the common themes in dreams.  Apparently, being chased is one of the most common dream occurrences.  Being naked or underclothed in public is also extremely common, as is dreaming of being unprepared; such as having to take a test and realizing you haven't been going to class or doing homework.  Since I'm half-awake, I think now would be a good time to list some common themes in my dreams.  I'm going to minimally edit what follows, to preserve the loose-association style.  Not all blog posts have to be fully-baked, do they?

I am, in fact, often naked or just in underwear in dreams, although I don't recall these dreams very often when I'm awake.  When I do remember such a dream, then I remember that I have had a lot of dreams like this.  In the dreams, I'm walking around without nearly enough clothes on, but it's a more minor embarrassment than it would be in real life.  It's almost like an inconvencience:  "Here I am again in my underwear.  Sigh....".

I dream about towns a lot.  Interesting, quirky towns, with colorful houses, and steep streets.  These towns are hilly, with a very up-and-down, three-dimensional character.  The houses are stacked up the hillsides, and the streets are windy.

Occasionally I dream I have super-powers, often Spiderman-like (I'm a Spiderman fan from way back).  In these dreams I can usually jump very far, and I'm moving between closely-spaced buildings like Spiderman, not swinging on webs, but leaping, grabbing ledges and poles, swinging, and clinging to walls.  Once I dreamed that I was on top of a tall building, and I jumped off, and would drop several stories, grab a ledge to catch myself, and then drop again.  It was really fun.  Usually, I wake up from the superhero dreams very disappointed to find my superpowers gone.

I have related dreams where I have amazing abilities, but don't think of them as being "superpowers".  Once I had a dream where I was in a big field, with boulders scattered about a hundred feet apart.  I could jump from one to the other.  Once again, big fun.  I rarely have dreams where I can fly, although sometimes I have dreams where I can sort of swim through the air by moving my arms and legs. I had a dream once where I was in a hallway, and there were a several dogs leaping up at me.  I was able to swim-fly and stay above them, near the ceiling.

Quick listing of other themes:

Landscapes:  wide, western-type landscapes.  Sometimes very non-realistic, like looking at a map.

Mountains:  Steep, cone-shaped mountains, smaller than many real mountains, but still intimidating, because of their steepness.  Similar to Pinnacle Mountain in Arkansas, or Cuckold's Head in Newfoundland.  Just a few hundred feet tall, with rocky or grassy slopes.  Not many trees.

I've had a few dreams about the writer Annie Dillard, after reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (she's brilliant, and in the picture in the edition I had, quite attractive).  In one, she was a singer-songwriter, playing music I found really profound.

Sometimes I dream of reading, but I can't really read, because the words keep shifting and morphing on the page.  Sometimes I dream about finding a book or series of books that is exactly what I'm looking for.  I used to be fascinated by A.B. Guthrie's books about the west, especially the first one, The Big Sky.  Once I dreamed I had found a whole series of books about mountain men, very much like The Big Sky.

In some dreams I'm underground, in a labrinth-like space.  Sometimes I dream that these spaces are full of interesting things.  Sometimes I dream of vast junk-shops full of stuff I'm really interested in.  Sometimes these are normal stores, although with more rooms than usual.  Occasionally, they are underground.  Interesting that a lot of myths have underground regions, and subterranean races and characters.

This may be different from dreams, but sometimes as I'm going to sleep, I become aware of mental conversations I am having with myself.  I get the sense these were ongoing, and I simply started paying attention to them, perhaps because nothing else was distracting me.  Could it be that our minds really do have these internal conversations going on much of the time, but we only become aware of them as we're going to sleep?  I read a quote from Jung somewhere that said dreams are like the stars.  They are there all the time, but we can only perceive them at night, when the bright sunlight of daytime concerns fades away.  I need to find that quote.

A related thing is the crazy hypnogogic thoughts you have when you are falling asleep or waking up.  They are usually wildly illogical, but they may seem to make excellent sense at the time.  As I've gotten older, I've learned to recognize these as signs that I'm falling asleep.  I've recently noticed weird thoughts about my alarm clock (cell phone), as I'm waking up.  When I was thinking about buying a car, I was thinking about whether to hit snooze again wondering "Ten minutes.  Can I afford that interest rate?"  Lately, I've been really interested in language and linguistics.  I was sleeping late, and kept hitting snooze, and having weird, half-asleep thoughts each time.  I was thinking about the word "snooze", and getting it confused with the word "doze".  I was thinking of snooze have the past tense of "snoze", and thinking doze should have some other tense of "dooze".  All this seemed very important at the time.

Sometimes dreams, and the weird falling-asleep thoughts, can seem very meaningful, even if they turn out not to be in waking life.  Once I had a dream where I was thinking about the line in the Bob Dylan song "Subterranean Homesick Blues", that says "The pump don't work cause the vandals took the handles".  I decided that he was talking about the Vandals, as in the marauding Germanic tribe.  And somehow that explained everything.

Sometimes a have dreams about St. John's, Newfoundland (I lived there for a couple of years).  It's one of those hilly towns I like to dream about.  It also has a harbor in the middle, and sometimes I dream that there are whales in the harbor.  I saw whales in Newfoundland, but never in the harbor.  Still, they are one of the most jaw-dropping sights I've ever seen; the way they emerge from the depths, and they are so huge that their back comes out of the water, and just keeps on moving past you.  Like a city bus suddenly surfaced and then dove again.  Somehow this seems to resonate with my idea of waking versus sleeping consciousness.  The unconscious is that mysterious, dark realm under the water.  Waking consciousness is whats above the water.  Sometimes huge, fantastic creatures emerge from the depths, and surface, and let you glimpse them before plunging into the depths again.  Could dark realms, such as underwater or underground, play a role in dreams because it is the way the mind sees its own more mysterious regions?

I also have the test anxiety dream.  In those dreams, it's the end of the semester, and I had forgotten that I was even supposed to be going to this particular class.  It's almost always a math class, because I hate math and am terrible at it.

Another anxiety dream I have, which evokes a vague sense of embarrassed despair, sort of like the "naked in public" dreams, is a dream that I have had to go back to high school.  I flunked out of college, and had to finish high school.  This is more relevant for me than for most people, because I actually did leave high school after my junior year, to go to college.  I didn't graduate high school, and a lot of people thought I would regret it.  I didn't.  But that gives it the extra layer of embarrassment, because in the dreams I'm back amongst all the high school people, and many of them have this "I told you so" attitude about it.  Horrifying.

Some things in waking life seem very dreamlike to me, whether or not I dream about them.  Subways seem incredibly dreamlike.  The way they move, much more soundlessly than you expect for something that big.  Also the way both ends look the same, so as they leave the terminal they look like they are going backwards, and the film in playing in reverse.  The way the air pressure changes in the terminal when they arrive and depart.  The way, when you're on a subway, that the lights and scenes you are passing flash on and off, alternating between light and dark.  Of course, subway terminals are underground, so that makes them resemble real dreams.  The way you descend into the depths, on escalators, which give you a dream-like sense of disconnected motion anyway.  One of the most dreamlike things I've ever experienced is taking an really long escalator (like 250 feet) into a deep underground subway terminal in Hungary.  There was a woman talking on the intercom in Hungarian, which sounded exotic and sort of Dracula-sinister to me (Yeah, I know Transylvania is in Romania, not Hungary, and Romanian is nothing like Hungarian).  Anyway, I don't think I've ever dreamed about a subway, that I can recall.  I just feel like I'm dreaming when I'm riding one or waiting for one.

The western United States, with its unbelievably wide, often freakish landscapes, also makes me feel like I'm dreaming, because it seems so much larger than life.  You're constantly half-thinking that it can't be real; it's too big.  But it is real.  It's just too much to wrap your head around.  Before I ever saw the west, I had dreams about steep hills, and dark valleys, like in Arkansas.  After I saw the west, I kept on dreaming about the hills and valleys, but I also started dreaming of vast western-type landscapes.

Of course, I often dream about interactions with other people.  But this opens a whole new realm, which I'm too tired to get into right now.

OK, now I'm more half-asleep than half-awake.  Which only makes sense if you are half-asleep.  So I'm going back to bed.  Maybe I'll post this in the morning, and ask people what they dream about.  How about it, tomorrow morning people?  What are some of your dream themes?