Visiting John Lennon

Having experienced sleep-depriving pain the previous night, I decided yesterday to fill that pain-killer prescription the doctor gave me last week, but which I had postponed taking to the pharmacy. I'm not keen on taking medications, particularly pain-killers, but it seemed like a good idea to give it a try as an alternative to a second wakeful night of pain. I took one pill during the day--more out of curiosity, I have to say, than absolute necessity--and ended up feeling a little bit woozy. And a little bit sleepy. And a little bit high.

So I took another before going to bed and was rewarded with particularly vivid dreams, of which I remember something of two, separate, one late night and one early morning. Both were about dead people.

In the late night dream I went to visit John Lennon. He was living in a mansion surrounded by a vast sunlit estate and greeted me cordially, if somewhat dreamily, in loose-fitting shirt and pants. He was wearing those familiar glasses with round lenses. I can't remember the purpose of my visit, nor what we talked about, but it was pleasant to spend time with John Lennon. After a while he had to leave, for some unstated reason, but before he did so he gave me a gold CD on which he had written my name, Peter.

I wandered out into the garden and was challenged by a young man who was chatting with someone by the entry. I thought he was perhaps a kind of plain clothes security man. He gave me a hard, unfriendly stare and asked: "What are you doing here?" Then he seemed to know without my answering and allowed me to proceed. The garden, it turned out, was a vast, flat, formally landscaped affair with few plants but many statues, pathways, and pebbled areas. The visitors were sparse, and seemingly silent, figures in a landscape... I remember nothing more.

Waking from this dream--and after a visit to the bathroom--I lay in bed wondering if the dream could be some kind of premonition--long-view, I hope!--of an afterlife, a vision of heaven, or nirvana. It was certainly peaceful, serene. Was that St. Peter who challenged me?

The second dream was more bizarre. A once-close friend, now dead for several years, came down to visit from up north with a friend of his. There's little I remember about his visit, except that (Ellie being absent from this dream) we slept in the same bed. In the morning--sensitive readers, close your eyes! This was a dismaying vivid part!--he casually masturbated before getting up and heading for the bathroom. I lay in bed for a while wondering when my turn was going to come, but it never did. Honest!

Then it became a question of whether to have breakfast or brunch. We took a tube train to wherever we were going and I had a rollie suitcase, as did several other people on the train. I nearly walked off with the wrong one. Then we were in a parking lot where there were white cars bumping into each other... and the dream fell apart.

I can't help but feel that it was somehow significant that the two main characters in my dreams were both dead. Clearly, I'd say, there was some projection going on. And I wonder what that pain-killer had to do with everything. The "afterlife" in the two dreams was certainly very different--a formal landscape and a parking lot with white cars colliding! Just thought I'd write them down before they got forgotten...

Have a great weekend, everyone.