DEATH: Dreams in which we actually die are a means of experimenting with meeting death. If we are frightened of death and have not worked out a relationship with it, then we will not live fully and daringly. In our dream life, death usually holds in it the promise of change or regeneration-rebirth. Dreams sometimes use death to illustrate leaving something behind, such as a relationship when love is dying.
In my dream, I was rushing to pack a bag, anxious to escape. My freedom was coming to a bitter end. A lover was coming to take me to my execution. I had less than an hour left. At first resigned to facing my fate, I was now determined not to die for a crime of which I was innocent. With renewed hope, my hand was on the door, the last familial goodbyes and kisses completed when my lover arrived before I could escape. Looking at the bag in my hand, the hope on my face, he told me I could not hide. The Law would find me wherever I went. I was GPS�d via the ring permanently attached to my finger, dialed in, locked down. I had no choice but to come with him and take the final walk. As the hopeless horror of Dead Woman Walking began to sink in, I pulled away, turned to run�..and awoke.
As a child, (and this was before films were rated), my parents thought it appropriate to protect me from anything in literature, film or TV that could be considered scary. The closest I got was Matt Dillon, The Rifleman, or Paladin handing out death without blood from the working end of a six-shooter. And the demise of Bambi�s mother, which haunted me for years.
I never saw how monsters were annihilated or horror subdued. I never experienced the delicious grip of fear liberated from danger. So I am left to wonder, if we learn how to conquer the dread, creepiness and fuzzy swarming doom in childhood, are we better able to defeat the real monsters we face when we grow up?
Everyone I know has watched the movies I still cannot bring myself to view. Frankenstein, Dracula, Wolfman, and the Mummy flourish in my imagination. Monsters like King Kong, Godzilla, Mothman, Rodan, and The Alien apparently take over the world at their leisure. The mere mention of Freddy, Jason or Chuckie causes me to collapse into a cesspool of primordial fear. They still exist because I�ve never actually seen them vanquished. I�ve never seen the happy ending.
Most of my adult dreams are full of music, love, poetry, orgasms and fantasy. Most of my childhood dreams were full of unspeakable horrors. Nightmares, nuclear disasters, terrors, monsters, arterial spray and intestinal gore. Running without getting anywhere, paralyzing fear that failed to leave even when I finally jerked awake with screams and tears. I dreamed of every imaginable horror movie I never saw and every monster from every book I never read.
The techniques of a nightmare�s stalking horror might vary but the point is the same: to take control from you and put you at its whimsy where you can be killed at its leisure. The essence of it is the fear of death, the personification of the cold place toward which we all progress. It has been written that the best way to reduce the anxiety fear creates is to confront it in safe circumstances. You�re sort of rehearsing your own death, so that when it arrives, you won�t go all to pieces. Thus, tales that look at what in life is seldom looked at � death by all sorts of terror, a corpse�s flesh, the stench of the tomb, the death-haunted dark places - seem to have a fascination.
In my dream, death was not an invasion of body by blade, but invasion of mind by ghost. It was a primordial fear, mental, and weirdly sexualized. The question remains � was the dream-death brought on by the love that seduces me or the one that dominates me. If death of a sort lies at the end, it isn�t the point � both slice my will away and make me something worse than a corpse; they make me a slave.
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