LITTLE ROCK — There's a crocodile sniffing at my feet. I'm shinnying along a tether or a bar of some kind above what a moment ago was suburban ground and now there's a crocodile sniffing at my feet.
What would my "Book of Dreams" make of that? Not to worry. For once, there is a logical explanation. As consciousness returns, I realize the dog has been trying to awaken me for her morning constitutional.
Either dreaming is different for everyone or my pattern is an aberration. In either case, I've never watched a dream sequence in a theatrical film or television show that bore any resemblance to mine. Mine do not unfold smoothly or logically as the action moves from point A to point B, but twist and turn in an instant.
They have their logical moments, but it doesn't take an anxious dog sniffing at my heels for dreamland to transmogrify into Bizarro World. One minute I'm going grocery shopping, the next I'm running for my life through a house with toomany doors and not enough windows. Not that it would occur to me to crawl out of one if it were open.
Moments before the crocodile, I was definitely inside a house defending it against intruders. Or maybe the intruders had come and gone and I was trying to secure it.It could have been both. How I came to be making like the marauders Ralphie dispelled with his official Red Ryder carbine-action, 200-shot, range-model air rifle with a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time-the clothesline that one of the ruffians scampered across like a sloth on uppers sounds awfully familiar-is a mystery to me.
So-called anxiety dreams are my stock in trade, or maybe it's their nature that so impresses me that I forget all the other types as soon as they die. (Die's the word. The closest they ever seem to come to fading is when they progress toward the strange, the outlandish or the horrible very slowly.)
I have several that recur every so often, and one that has been with me since childhood. Blame it on Mama, who never should have let me stay up to watch "Frankenstein" on TV-every time it came on.
I'm joking, of course. In the Fifties, "Frankenstein" was as much a matinee staple as a late-night one. Over the years, I've probably seen it more times than I've seen "A Hard Day's Night," and, for me, that's really saying something.
The person who's really to blame is Freud, who popularized dream interpretation on what you might call the psycho-sexual level. But assign a smidgenof fault to Artemidorus, a Grecian soothsayer whose four-volume opus, completed around 150 A.D., summarized many centuries' worth of dream interpretation theories.
It would seem that oneiromancy, or divination by dreams, is almost as old as mankind, for where there is man, there are dreams to puzzle him.
I've met a number of people whose dreams are visited periodically by The Monster, but for them the circumstances or the setting or the action is always different. Not for me. Mine always follow the same script. Thank goodness for rule No. 1 of dream menacing: If you tuck yourself into the farthest corner of a dark closet where The Monster can't see you,well, he can't see you! Saved again!
I wonder why it didn't work for Jamie Lee Curtis in "Halloween."
She may be one of the lucky ones, though. Having acted out her own celluloid version of the "Frankenstein" nightmare, she probablynever repeats it in her sleep. Instead, she probably finds herself late for a class she cannot find or walking into a room full of people properly dressed while she is not.
Those are common anxiety dreams, suggesting, the dream delvers tell us, frustration or insecurity.
Then there's falling. Some dreamers fall off buildings or bridges. Curbs are my specialty. Wakes me up every time. That's reassuring, because someone once told me that if you don't wake up before you hit bottom, you die. He couldn't explain how anyone could possibly know this, though.
Psychology wasn't one of my best subjects in college, but it was one of my favorites, an interest born of adolescent dabbling in parapsychology, which fueled my fascination with the incredible cosmos of the mind. Will we ever truly know it?
Even folks who mine the mind aren't confident that we will, but when you consider the way of the world-or rather, the people in it-it gives you reason to pray that they're wrong.
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Associate editor Meredith Oakley is editor of the Voices page. An earlier version of this column ran on April 19, 2004.
Editorial, Pages 21 on 10/24/2007