I’m not getting enough sleep. That’s what I’m currently going to blame my inability to remember my dreams on.

I caught myself last night waking from a dream with a full cognitive grasp of the full details of the dream I had just come out of. My vision was distorted—similar to the geometric patterns I was seeing a week or two ago. I was fully aware that I wanted to document what I had just dreamed, but it was a struggle to even move. I got it written down though. And reading it when I woke this morning has pulled it back into focus. I think I’m so exhausted that when I do wake, I want to immediately crash back to sleep, and the dream memory gets written over by the next dream, or at least pushed down the stack.

I think the real key to chronicling dreams in this way is to include as many odd details as possible. It’s rarely the big things that trigger the memory of a dream for me. It’s easy to remember setting, time of day, who else was there. For example, the other night when I dreamed about the comic book store, I could see it in my head, but the details of what happened in my dream were lost to me. I had written down “inhumanoid tendril toy”, which at first didn’t make sense to me when I woke. It was only when I looked it up online that the entirety of the dream came back to me—the closing due to Covid, the secret club, the basketball game. It seemed unimportant in the context of the dream because it so briefly was  part of it, but tapping into that memory opened access to the rest.

TINY BOATS AND SNAKES

This is the only dream I had the chance to write down from last night. All others are lost, but I know I dreamed prolifically.

This took place in the dream version of Redbud Trail, but a late 80s version. Redbud Blvd was not extended through yet, but the dip at Greenwood was there and seemed to be freshly paved.

The city was flooded and the only method of transport that seemed available was tiny boats. They operated like jet skis, but were shaped like the boats from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade during the Venice sequence. They could only fit one person, so it was almost like a go kart for the water.

The dream was rather boring at first. I was cruising around on my boat, exploring all the flooded areas. There never seemed to be so much flooding that houses or buildings were underwater, but the streets were all flooded, so it seemed like a bunch of interconnected canals.

The bulk of the dream took place around Redbud. The usual slightly-wrong houses were there, but there were no people around.

I was making the turn toward Greenwood when I hit the little hill, which had become a small waterfall with floodwater rushing down it. In the distance I could see the two churches and the span between them completely flooded. It was night.

When I hit the waterfall, I lost control of the boat and slammed into a rock or a curb or something and it shattered my boat. I still had the steering wheel and a portion of the front end, but my body and legs were in the water. I drove around like this for a bit when I noticed some other people in the treed area at RedBud Blvd and Greenwood also riding their tiny boats around.

I approached them but they shouted for me to stay away. I couldn’t understand why they wanted me to go away, so I approached them anyway. Then I heard it:

“WATER MOCCASINS!”

By that time, I was already driving in between the trees, and I could feel snake bodies sliding against my legs and body. I tried to escape but the remains of the boat kept me just circling in the mass of snakes.

One of the snakes got up on my shoulder and I could see it’s head. I desperately pressed my head and neck against my shoulder and pinned the snake there while I continued to try and drive out of the trees.

By this time, the other people had made their way out and were signally me over to safe ground. I made it, but as I pulled up to them, I still had the snake pinned on my shoulder.

That’s when I woke up … with my head and shoulder in that same position pressed against each other. I had slipped off my pillow.