fever dreams

Whenever I am sick my dreams always shift dramatically.  Interestingly enough, my dreams usually change the night before I’m truly ill.  It could be said that these dreams are the blossoms of a climbing fever.

My fever dreams are quite different from any of my other dreams.  In most of my dreams I am conjuring up complete images, correct in size and shape.  In my fever dreams I am inside and/or smaller than the completed image.  For example, in a dream of playing tennis I am not playing tennis.  I am crawling through the strings of a racquet or navigating the tread of the player’s sneakers as they race around the court.

In my fever dreams I have leapt from banana to orange in a gigantic fruit bowl.  I have rolled through the canyon’s of a tiled floor in a runaway droplet of water.  Perhaps my favorite fever dreams are those that place me in a field of threads.  Whether it’s a corduroy couch or a crazy quilt I am always consumed with the repetitive movements of climbing with absolutely no goals of reaching any summit.

While somewhat off putting, my fever dreams are always meditative, cathartic and quiet.  I am reassured by the soft embrace of static that hums around me as my dream fumbles to put the giant scenery in my microscopic hands.

Towards the end of an illness an ordinary dream always emerges with a snap.  It’s always when I am beginning to feel better, but just out of the reach of recovery.  This last time, towards the end of a victorious battle with the flu I slipped into sleep, hopeful for the foggy static but finding myself standing in line with a full shopping cart at a packed mega store of some kind.  As I waited in line I leaned against my cart, but was also simultaneously aware that my sleeping self couldn’t turn over because of the shopping cart.  I woke up very sore after hours of being trapped by a pretend shopping cart.  What a terrible way to transition into ordinary dreams again!