White

I am a very vivid dreamer. My dream life is almost as real to me as my waking one, but I am not a lucid dreamer. I almost never know I am dreaming, or feel I have any control over it.

I know that my waking life affects my dreams, but most of the time I couldn't tell you exactly how. Right now I am reading Lolita for my book club. I read it just before I go to sleep every night. That is always when I read, and the first dream I had last night was obviously attributed to this.

The later ones, though, were infinitely more interesting.

I lived in a very small, very cramped, white house with my husband and two very young sons. There was clutter everywhere in the narrow crooked hallways and rooms and I was trying to dress the boys for school. I couldn't find the right socks, or matching shoes, or parts of the snowsuits and I finally just picked up the youngest and carried him, in my bare feet, down a snow filled white hallway to the white door of the school and handed him off into a white light. I was a little concerned about being barefoot in that snowy hallway, but not too.

I returned to our door and was suddenly accosted by peasant type military soldiers who took me, a man, another woman and a girl about eleven years old into custody. They strapped us to medical gurneys and wheeled us off down a hospital like hallway with white lights on the ceiling. The next thing I knew I was wearing a long white cotton nightgown and sitting, strapped to a chair that was racing on wheels down a railroad track toward a small western town. I knew the others were experiencing the same thing and I was trying to reassure the girl, but none of us knew what was going on and we were spread out over a great distance. One behind the other.

We ended up in the town, still sitting strapped to our chairs and being greeted by townsfolk who told us we would get used to being there.

That was it. I woke up and the frustrating part is that I will probably never know the rest of the story.