Dreams: Movies of the Mind

Since the age of 17, I have had the same recurring nightmare during the months of May and December: I am sitting in a large auditorium, surrounded by my college friends, attempting to take a final exam for a class I never attended for the entire semester.

Hardly an uncommon dream, some sleepers are haunted only during their high school and college years, while others, like myself, are plagued far beyond their days of academia. This year I made it four full nights into the month of May before the familiar movie played in my head.

Popular dream interpretations include the dreamer has forgotten to do something important in their daily life, can be seen as a metaphor to paths not taken, of goals not achieved with the passage of time, or may reflect a sense of the dreamer knowing what she should do but is reluctant to do what is necessary.

However, last night this popular dream was part of a double feature, and I had a nightmare that I can’t remember having since I was first married almost twenty years ago. While I only had the dream once, it was so bizarre, tactile and vivid that I was never able to forget it:

I’m an older teenager, in my parents’ backyard, cleaning up after some sort of graduation or birthday party. Suddenly the lawn turns into a river and I find myself over my head in muddy, dark water that is pulling me toward the fence line.

Before I reach the chain link fence, I break the surface and I see something large moving under the swirling water, and I immediately begin to panic because I’m being sucked in the direction of the mass.

Suddenly a hippo bursts from the water, and I see my legs in front of me, floating directly into the open mouth of this massive, pissed-off creature. I cling so tightly to the fence that my fingers start to bleed as the water begins to move more swiftly, and now I’m kicking and screaming as the hippo moves in closer to me.

The dream lasts no longer than twenty seconds, but is terrifyingly vivid: I am wet, cold and shivering from the water, I can taste the mud and feel the steel of the fence rings between my fingers, I can see my bloody hands and the glistening hump of the hippo’s back, his craggy teeth and his brownish-pink tongue.

I awake both times sitting bolt upright in bed with no clue where I am, clammy, heart pounding and head throbbing. I look beside my bed half expecting to see a hippo in the water, impatiently waiting for me to dangle my feet off the bed and pull me under once and for all.

Once my heart rate slows, it is almost funny that I am being stalked by a hippo. Seriously, a hippo? Not a tiger or bear or even a great white shark, but a hippo?

Michael Vigo’s almost six-hundred page “An A to Z Dream Dictionary” and his associated “Dream Moods” website painstakingly laundry lists and analyzes almost every imaginable element of a dream to assist others in interpreting their movies of the mind, from the mundane to the truly bizarre.

As my hippo dream is two-fold, I must isolate the two main themes to utilize Vigo’s text: The hippo and the attack. According to Vigo, the fact that I am being attacked by an animal is a warning to be careful of those around me. I am to take notice of whom I know in my waking life that shares the same qualities of the animal that attacked me in my dream.

Oh, but wait, it gets better: The hippo symbolizes my aggressive nature and hidden strengths, and that I have more influence and power than I realize – or – I am being territorial because someone near me is overstepping their boundaries.

Bottom line interpretation: I am an aggressive, power-hungry woman protecting her territory from someone who shares the same physical and emotional qualities as one of the most dangerous animals in Africa (?).

Color me silly, but somehow I think I would have noticed some enormous person with brown, craggy teeth hanging around my family. I know I have been preoccupied and not quite myself in the past few weeks, but I don’t think a person of this description would have escaped my notice.

Until further notice, I will be keeping a safe distance from all UPS trucks in the neighborhood.