I thought it might be fun to talk dreams. I suspect others like me had one or two recurring dreams when they were a child. And recurring nightmares.
In my favorite childhood dream, I was Super Girl. When I pounded two wide bracelets on my wrists together, I could whirl around in a circle Tasmanian Devil-like and when I stopped, be dressed in cowboy gear from head to foot, including lots of fringe and even leather chaps. There were two variations of the Super Girl dream. In one, I could fly.
That was another amazing recurring dream I had as a child, of flying, soaring through the sky as just me, dressed in regular clothes doing loops around freeway overpasses.
In the more common Super Girl dreams, I summoned a beautiful white horse with wings. It always arrived with its companion black horse with wings. Someday, the love of my life would appear and ride that black horse.
But in the meantime, it was just me and the two horses rising up into the sky until we reached headquarters, a camp up in the clouds that had a line of different sized Army tents. Out of each came a different animal. A goofy brown horse was the comic relief character.
I had the ability to talk to all the various animals, who were my helpers, my sidekicks and partners in fighting crime. Together, we could fly around and save the day.
The recurring nightmare I had as a kid terrified me, with the same frightening scenario happening in two different settings. One happened on the elementary school grounds. Fellow students and friends entered the cafeteria on one end. Unsuspectingly. When they emerged out the other end, their personalities were removed. They marched single-file, stepping in unison with empty looks in their eyes, like zombies. Each held the fingers of his or her right hand against his temples, arm bent at the elbow. The other hand held the elbow, forming an open triangle with their arms. As the kids walked past in a slow, unified shuffle, they repeated only one word rhythmically, “Two. Two. Two. Two.”
I made the mistake of telling my older brother about the dream and, of course, he would imitate the zombies I described, marching towards me with a vacant face and his arms just so saying, “Two. Two. Two,” while I yelled, “Stop it, Davey!”
My husband even teased me about it at first when I told him. But he stopped when I told him it actually still freaked me out.
The other version of the dream took place at a birthday party in which kids were petting ponies and horses over a fence in front of a picturesque red barn. Then all the birthday attendees went into the barn and came out as that single-file line of mindless, collective zombies.
By the way, I don’t think I’d ever seen a zombie movie when I started having this dream, back in something like 1972. I can’t watch horror movies. I avoid them. One horrific scene can flash in my mind for years after. I can still see a particularly grotesque Hannibal scene from Red Dragon almost 20 years later and the self-inflicted abortion scene from The Other Side of Midnight that my parents took me and a friend to see when it was in the theatres in 1977. I was twelve. (I don’t know what they were thinking!)
In interpreting my nightmare, I figured when I was younger that I was just scared of conformity, scared of losing my individuality. Now looking back, it seems even more complex, more than symbolism. It was actually happening to me in a way. In my family, I tempered my personality, hid and minimized who I was and my emotions in order to be accepted and loved. It’s what I thought I had to do. And looking back, that is terrifying. It caused me to lack full autonomy until I was much, much older.
On the flipside, I remember how free and light I felt in my flying dreams and how great it felt to be in charge of my own life as Super Girl—except for that damn black horse awaiting a male counterpart. I remember wishing that horse wasn’t there in my older youth.
This “Prince Charming” never materialized in my dreams, and after looking longingly at the bare back of the stallion, I didn’t give it much more thought once I reached headquarters and all the wonderful animals there and I had a job to do.
I don’t know how old I was when I stopped having those recurring dreams and nightmares. But I can still imagine them. Vividly.
Photo by Olesya Yemets on Unsplash