Hello dreamers! We’ve made it through deliberations! I hope everyone is proud of their participation. I think everyone did a great job. This week on In Your Dreams, we are analyzing one of my own dreams that struck me as symbolic recently.
Onto the dream!
Meteor Voices
I lay on my back the ground, alone, staring up at a clear night sky. I am somewhere in the mountains. The stars burn bright pinholes in the black, expansive darkness. I am on the grass and I can feel the pointy blades tickling my arms and legs. It is summertime. It must be.
As I watch the sky, a white blur streaks across it between a wide cluster of stars, there for a split second and then gone. I keep watching, my interest growing along with my peace. In another pocket of the sky, away from the first, another radiating blur streaks across the inky plane, there momentarily and then gone. I see another one elsewhere in the sky, there and gone.
Soon more of what I now recognize to be meteors explode white across the dotted black palette, never lingering. I hear a soft chattering coming from above, but I think I am mishearing. It’s just a trick of the ear, like stars may once have been thought of as a trick of the light. But the chattering grows, and I realize that as it grows louder, more meteors burst across my vision. They are speaking.
The meteors whisper and murmur as they exist visibly for a moment and then individually go quiet when they disappear. There are so many of them that their voices become uproarious, a tidal wave of sound and light.
This is where the dream ends.
The Analysis
In my dream, meteors grew voices. They became like humans, or at least showed signs of life to a human, and I, a human, became privy to their conversations. The question is whether they intended for me to hear their conversations or whether I was a happenstance listener in the private details of the lives of astronomical bodies, somebody who just happened to stumble in at just the right time to hear the phenomenon.
It is worth noting that I could not understand what the meteors were saying in the dream even when there were only a few of them. They spoke in a language beyond human understanding. This separates me, the spectator, from them, the spectacle. Their language was indecipherable to me, so I was held apart from the beauty of the phenomenon. I don’t remember how I felt in the dream, but based on this analysis, I would suggest that there was likely a sense of longing to become a celestial body, to participate in their conversation, and to transcend human life.
There is also the point of the meteors’ transience which makes them like humans. Meteors are only visible to the human eye for a few seconds before they disappear. Like the human lifespan, the “lifespan” of a meteor is brief. This similarity perhaps added onto the feeling of longing—if I am going to live a brief life anyway, why not become a meteor and burn brightly for all to see?
Overall, this dream exemplifies my human desire to be like a meteor.
This dream also inspired a poem that I wrote for my poetry class about a comet, another astronomical phenomenon. You can read it below:
Halley’s Comet, 2061
You asked me a celestial lifetime ago
whether I would return.I traveled long stretches in the darkness,
the barren planes stirring
undistilled loneliness
until distant stars guided me back to you.You, groundling:
Feet tethered by gravity
to the earth.
Eyes skyward, wide,
reflecting the whole
of my soaring
across your lifetime.We mirror one another again,
separated only by atmosphere.
My nucleus gazing over the Earth,
your face watching the sky.Two orbs, each miming the other
across space: your pale, awed face,
my burning body.
The spark in your eyes
as you stare into me
as bright as the sparks dancing
across my surface.
Your hair streaming behind your ears
like my kind’s detritus.Me as cinder, ice, and ions,
you as star-born flesh.You, human watcher, the one
I have longed for—to see you,
standing there, alight with wonder
at something so like yourself.
That is the mystery I return to—You asked me a celestial lifetime ago
whether I would return.I have waited 2 billion
three hundred-sixty-five million
two-hundred thousand seconds
of the sun’s turning
to answer you:
Yes, yes, yes.
Stay loose and dream lucid!