Dandelyon's Worlds

For some reason, I didn't see the Friday Five questions until today.  They are all about dreams, which is an interesting topic.

1. What was the last dream that you had about?

Lately, a lot of my dreams have been set at SF cons, though usually ones that aren't at all realistic. They might be in an office building, for instance, or a huge mansion, and I spend time with unlikely people and there's usually no filk. In real life, I rarely go to a con that doesn't have organized filking, both because I love the song circles and because a lot of my closest friends at cons are filkers. But there are often speculative fiction elements that, in the dream, are perfectly normal and real. Actual vampires or shifters, for instance, or casual minor time travel, or one or another sort of magic, or any number of other things. I always have things to do, though those things don't always make sense to my waking mind. But they matter in the dream.

2. Does it hold any significant meaning to you?

I have not, in the recent past, woken up with any particular sense of meaning that carries forward to my waking life.  Except, perhaps, the obvious--that I wish I lived in a world without Covid, and was spending more time traveling and spending time with friends.  But I certainly don't need dreams to have that insight.  Now that I wonder about the "cons with no filking" thing, it occurs to me that I get to do a lot of filking via zoom, and very little of the other things I enjoy at cons.  Perhaps the dreams are just trying to fill a need.

3. Do you dream in color or black and white?

Color. Sound and feeling too.  My dreams are very realistic, if you judge "realistic" by having a full sensory experience and not by the presence or absence of speculative fiction elements.  It's very rare for me to have a dream that wouldn't be judged SF or fantasy for the presence of those elements, and has been since I was small.

4. What is the most frightening dream you ever had?

The one that scared me the most ever was when I was in High School and dreamed I'd forgotten to do my math homework.  I woke up in a panic, and it took some time for me to go over the events of the day before in my mind to reassure myself that the experience was not in the same continuous reality as my waking life, and must have been, therefore, only a dream.

(I have dreams that include monsters, even scary monsters, all the time, but those are antagonists in the current dream-adventure, which may be frustrating and challenging, but is not a nightmare.  Scary monsters are a thing to challenge or outwit, or even occasionally befriend, they don't make the whole dream scary)

5. Is there one dream that stays clear in your mind despite the fact it was more than a few years ago?

In college, I had a dream where I was swimming in the middle of the ocean, and instead of worrying about whether there were sharks or whether I could survive until found or swim to somewhere I could get out on dry land or anything else reasonable and logical, I was frantically trying to keep my watch out of the water. There was a soundtrack--"You've got to stop and smell the roses..." Upon awakening, I thought that dream, at least, had a very clear meaning!

In the very distant past, on a night after some one of my relatives took me on a trip on the el to (somewhere) in Chicago for something (Christmas displays?  A sports thing?  Shopping?) I remember spending the entire night looking at still photographs of all the strange people I saw.  The next morning, my mother asked me how I slept and I said not at all.  Of course, she inquired further, and finally, upon me describing my experience of the night before, she told me I had been dreaming.  I was VERY doubtful of that explanation.  Looking at hundreds of photographs did not seem at all dream-like to my young self.  But my mother was relieved to realize I had been sleeping after all.