I love to sleep, to a fault. I have never seriously suffered from insomnia, although it seems a romantic notion to me, unable to sleep & gazing out the window at the world at 2am. When I get up to pee, I look out at our garden & our street in the wee early morning & I love the world at that time of night. But, I crave sleep. I enjoy a vivid & fantastic dream life.
Even these past 2 weeks, falling under the sandman’s spell through my Vicodin cloud, I still have yummy, warm, extravagant reveries of wandering around hallucinatory cities, with houses of endless rooms with lush interiors. I have frequent dreams of splendid men in repose. What could it mean?
I fall asleep to dream my dreams of you.
In dreams I walk with you. In dreams I talk to you.
In dreams you're mine. All of the time we're together
In dreams, In dreams.
But just before the dawn, I awake & find you gone.
I can't help it; I can't help it, if I cry.
I remember that you said goodbye.
It's too bad that all these things, can only happen in my dreams
I am endowed with a vivid & often dramatic dream life. A very long time ago, I attended a How To Remember & Record Your Dreams workshop, but I am not sure why I tend to remember my dreams. I once woke up & said to the Husband- “Wow, I just had a really zany dream I was wandering around this house where a party was in full swing. Billy Idol seemed to have been the guest of honor or the focus of the event. I walked past Mr. Idol in this small passage way, & he grabbed me & said- ‘ohhh Steve’, & kissed me, a long, drawn out tongue down my throat kiss!” The Husband said- “Shut up, I was sleeping, & by the way, lucky you. I was dreaming about stacking rugs (he works for a high end home furnishing store & is in charge of displaying a large selection of imported rugs). I always dream the most mundane things & you get to dream of having sex with movie stars. It is not fair!”
I often dream songs/music. It is difficult to describe. I hear the music, but I am also inside the music. It seems to be like a music video. Some of my music dreams are a bit detached…but lucky me, I am often performing in them, & of course I am just amazingly talented & charismatic in my dreams. I always wake up from these feeling blissful.
Last night I dreamed- Sugar Walls, a song I cared nothing about when it was released in 1984. The Sheena Easton hit was penned just for her by Prince. Sugar Walls’ video was one of the 1st to be banned for the lyrics rather than its imagery. Some broadcasters refused to air the tune. Sugar Walls was also named by Tipper Gore as one of the Filthy 15- a list of songs deemed indecent because of their lyrics, alongside Prince's own Darling Nikki. I am sure this contributed to the song's popularity .It eventually reached hit #3 on the R&B singles chart & #9 on the Billboard Hot 100. Before achieving solo success, singer/songwriter Bruce Hornsby played in Easton's band in 1983 & 1984 and appeared in the video of Sugar Walls.
In my dream, I was singing & dancing this song to an audience in a Victorian Music Hall. The audience was in full preiod dress, & althoug I was lit with gas foot lights, I was in full New Wave garb with a Flock Of Seagulls haircut (which I actually had in the early 1980s).
Questions:
1. Why would I dream a song that I had only a passing interest in when it was released?
2. Why was the dream a mix of Victorian & 1980s in its setting?
3. Why didn’t a dream Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go, a song that I loved in 1984… & why wasn’t I making out with George Michael in my midnight reverie?
The season’s 1st round of flu/nasty cold hit our household last week. The husband was first on Monday; followed by me on Wednesday & T (the housemate) joined us in misery on Thursday. The Husband, still not feeling all that well, went back to work on Thursday, leaving T & me (hmmm…T & ME would make a good sitcom title) with 2 days of watching Perry Mason reruns & bunches of old movies including The King & I, which I had not seen in decades & it was as incredibly good as I had remembered. Does The King &I have the best Rodgers & Hammerstein score? Hollywood used to do an excellent job of making movie versions of stage musicals: Oklahoma, Carousel, South Pacific, & The Music Man.
I digress. The poor Husband suffers from a still undiagnosed lung ailment that was first discovered & nearly killed him in late 2004. He has highly scarred lung tissues & a common cold will hang on in his lungs long after other symptoms have moved on. He really suffers & my heart just breaks for him. In April, the Husband was given a session with a prominant psychic as a birthday gift. This person does not use astrology or any other method except just sitting with the subject & talking. She told him many amazing things, including that fact that he suffers from an unusual lung ailment because he – “had been killed by an arrow to the lung in the West during the 19th century”.
In Seattle, sometime in the late 1980s, I did some work for a woman who was a hypno-therapist. She had inquired if I would like to take some of my payment as a session with her. Not trying to stop smoking or loose weight, I asked her to what avail would I want to do this. She suggested a past life regression. I have a sense of adventure & I thought it would be a lark.
The hypno-therapist taped our session. When I came out of it, I was quite shaken & unhappy. It took me most of a week to get rid of my anxiety & shake the feeling off. She told me details of the session & I then listened to the tape, where I heard my voice, but with a different syntax & cadence than my own. When most people are told of a past life it seems that they were often royalty in Atlantis or a peasant during the French Revolution or some romantic notion. You rarely hear about a past life as a housewife in Akron. My reaction was dubious at first. Until I heard the tape.
It seems that I had a life right before my current life. I was Byron Skipworth, born in 1925 in a northern Chicago suburb. I had red hair (I was a red head in this life until I had no hair) & blue eyes. I was estranged from my family of a demanding & abusive father, a sickly mother & several older siblings. I left home at 15 & went into Chicago where I fell in with a group of jazz musicians, most of them black. These people liked me a great deal & named me "Skip". I (Skip) had studied piano when I was very young, but I found a calling playing drums with jazz groups. I was befriended by one black family that allowed me to sleep on a cot in a screened in “summer porch”. I stayed there even during the Chicago winters. At some point in the early 1940s, I was badly injured in an automobile accident. I spent the rest of my life in severe pain as a result of the accident & eventually became addicted to drugs including cocaine & heroin. I was homosexual & had several love affairs with black musicians. I died alone & broke from a heroin overdose in the winter of 1953, just 28 years old. I was born as Stephen in Oakland, California in early January 1954.
After the session, I did some research & found that a Byron Skipworth was born in 1925 in Evanston Illinois. I never looked further & I never listened to the tape again. I hated knowing about my past life & I have never felt comfortable trying to deal with this information. I eventually lost the tape.
Last night, I dreamed as Skip. In the dream I was on the "summer porch" on a winter day & I dreamed the entire sequence of preparing & then injecting heroin. I dreamed all the sensations & euphoria of the drug. In the dream, I made my way to the greenroom at a night club where I was urgently kissed by a very large, very dark black man. We had started having very rough but transcendent sex… & I then I woke up.
In this lifetime: I have spent a lot of time in Chicago & always felt familiar with the city. I have an innate musical ability & I play several instruments. From an early age I knew a host of musical & jazz standards. The Husband & my close friends consider me a savant in my ready knowledge of American music from the last 100 years. I have always had substance abuse issues. I had an early outrage at the treatment of African Americans, even before the civil rights movement in the 1960s, even as I was growing up in place where they were 1% of the population. I burst into tears whenever I hear All The Things You Are. & yet: I had a very happy & secure childhood, with 2 loving & supportive parents.I have never done heroin. I have had a lifelong irrational fear of syringes. I can actually pass out from seeing one on a counter at the MD’s or Vet’s office. I do not have a fetish for or about black men, although I appreciate the beauty of many African Americans. I have made it into my mid-50s.
The Husband’s psychic noted that he had a spouse/partner who- “worries too much, way too much. He needs to deal with it or it will be his undoing". She said we had been together in may past lives.
