Media Overload Affects Subconscious - 03.09.98 The other evening I had one of those dreams that's going to stick with me for a long time. It was very emotional, and the actual premise of the dream was one that made me think about it several times during the following day. Just so you know, when I had this dream, I still hadn't seen the movie that inevitably will come into discussion here. It does perhaps give some insight on how much I've been inundated with references to it, though. At the beginning of the dream, I was on the deck of a huge ship in the middle of the ocean. Although there were no signs saying so, I instantly knew that I was on the Titanic. The style of dress that everyone was wearing seemed to fit the period and it simply wasn't modern enough to be a new ship. At this particular point, I was pretty happy to be on board. It was a nice day and I was running all around on board, going from deck to deck and up and down stairs. After it started setting into late afternoon, and I ran down a huge staircase to a ballroom below. A band (nevermind one of the members was the lead singer of the Mighty Mighty Bosstones) was playing swing and there were tons of people in the room either dancing or sitting and listening. One person in the audience happened to be the female that I was attached to in this particular dream. On my way to talk to her, I suddenly remembered where I was. I grasped the arm of some guy and asked him what day it was. He happily exclaimed "April 15th, 1912" and my dream took a turn for the worse. Everyone was living it up and I suddenly knew that the ship would hit an iceberg and sink in just a few hours. I quickly went over to the girl I was with and politely asked her if she would like to go up to the main deck to get some fresh air. I decided that we would have a better chance of surviving if we were above when impact happened. Instead of telling her outright that the boat was going to sink, I simply tried to persuade her to come up to the deck with me and walk around. I didn't want anyone to panic and I knew in my head that everyone would just tell me that the boat was unsinkable. After much persistance, she still didn't want to go up to the deck and I knew that the time to impact was decreasing steadily. Instead of bursting out and telling her the disaster that was about to happen, I simply knelt down by her, put my head on her shoulder, and started crying. I pleaded with her for several minutes to come up to the deck, but she seemed to not even listen to me anymore. At that point, I woke up. Although it was all over, I still felt a bit sad. It was one of those times where the emotions of a dream carry over into the waking time and seem for a few moments as if they were very real. Over the course of writing it out in my dream journal, I thought about what all had happened. In essence, I had broken down both because I knew that I couldn't save the person I cared for, and also because I couldn't deal with the weight of the secret that I possessed. It was a classic fear of the inevitable and the inability to do anything to stop or even help it in the slightest. The more plausible explanation, though, is that I'm just a big wimp. |