Ice Dream

Just got home from seeing the movie INCEPTION.
It involved dreaming, and dreaming in a dream... and so on.
A good chunk of the movie was spent in somebody's dream, and it got me to thinking.

There was a scene in the movie in which a woman is stabbed in the stomach (in a dream),and she awakes abruptly clutching her midsection. It triggered a memory for me... of a dream I had many years ago. I've told only a few people about it, so why not my blog... only a few people read it anyways.

I had this dream back when I was living in California, working as a preschool teacher. As a Christmas present from one of my preschoolers, I received a Dream Pillow. It was the size of a VCR tape, had a Native American design, and was filled with a fragrant potpourri of herbs and flowers. The smell of it, though strong, was not immediately a pleasant scent. It wrinkled the nose if you sniffed it too close, which was why it instructed you to put it beneath your actual pillow when you slept. The label claimed that your dreams were to become more lucid, if you were able to integrate the scent into your sleep. Being a skeptic, I threw the little pillow into my bed, and thought nothing more of it.
Three nights later, I had this dream:

I was at a baseball game, sitting in the stands behind home plate. It was a warm summer day and I was among friends or family, except that there was nobody specific that I remember. We were enjoying the game and at one point, I recall trying to catch a foul ball landing near us. It fell out of our range, and we laughed about it because a few people had spilled their beers. As we settled back into our seats, I noticed two men arguing about something. One man was in the row behind us and he seemed drunk and angry. The other man was in the row in front of us, a family man, there with his wife and kids. I was trying to figure out why the angry man was so upset, and unlike my friends, I had yet to sit down. The disagreement got louder and less possible to just ignore, so I turned to the angry guy and tried to calm him down. He got even more irritated and began to yell loudly, gesturing wildly. Though I could not see the man behind me, I could feel that he was not backing down, and instead he too had becoming enraged. I was in the middle of a heated quarrel, wondering what to do.
The angry man looked me in the eye as he reached for something in his back pocket. I saw a flash of metal and as I put my hands out to stop him, he surprised me, and stabbed me in the stomach with a long silver knife. I felt an incredible pain and I recall the warmness of the blood as it pored through my trembling fingers. Slumping down into my chair, there was a fading whiteness that took over the view of the baseball game and like the movies, I began moving into a tunnel. At the end of the tunnel was the light, intense like the sun, yet beckoning.
I remember thinking that I was too young to die, as the scenes of my life began to play before my eyes like a slide show. There were early visions of me as a baby (that looked suspiciously familiar, like the home movies we would watch as kids). As the dream continued, my life was projected faster and faster, and I recognized snippets of images like I was leafing through an old photo album. The last image I remember was a picture from the baseball game, with the very same view as the one from our seats.

I woke up sweating, gripping my stomach and breathing hard. Sitting up in my bed, I tried to shake myself awake. The dream pillow sat next to my pillow, near a large drool stain. I reached for it and threw it into the other room.

After a shower and a Poptart, I remember feeling surprisingly rejuvenated, and I spent that day fishing with my brother, thinking... it was good to be alive.
I lent the Dream Pillow to my sister and I never asked for it back.

When I googled Dreaming about dying, I got this:
To dream that you die in your dream, symbolizes inner changes, transformation, self-discovery and positive development that is happening within you or in your life. Although such dreams may bring about feelings of fear and anxiety, it is no cause for alarm and is often considered a positive symbol.
Maybe my dream was like a time-release capsule and it took a decade for the transformation and the positive development to take place... or maybe... it still hasn't come through to fruition.

You could be dreaming now as you read this... and if you are, you will likely wake up sweating, clutching your gut... vowing never to read my blog again.