Cubist Dreams

Last night I had this dream again. I say again, though the dream is never the same, the complication is always the same: I cannot focus my eyes. I close my eyes to sleep or blink, and when I open them, all I see is flashed of bright colors, pieces of the scene I'm trying to see. It is like dreaming a Picasso or Braque during their analytical cubist period, only the colors are so bright, and I only see one piece of the painting at a time. My mind creates the distorted painting in an attempt to meld the pieces together.

Always I'm desperately trying to make out the scene. I open my eyes once, twice. I close them and try to focus on the back of my eyelids before I open them a third time. The scene is in focus, then slides back out.

The story line, I believe, is unimportant. This time, I walked over to the closet in the house where I grew up. It was a tiny thing, but it had deep shelves on either side of the doorway, and when I was a child I made a "reading nest" of pillows and blankets on the floor, and I'd go in there and feel safe and hidden in my little space with a shelf over my head and one over my feet. Anyways, in the dream, I opened this closet door, only in the dream, people from my job had sleeping places in there, like bunks. I think I was trying to do something nice for them, because they are the team working on the inventory, so I was trying to hang artwork, mostly Escher, but also a few other pieces that I didn't recognize (either in the dream or in real life).

Always through the task I'm trying to "see straight". I never do.

I should also mention that the cubist sight hurts. Like when you put on someone's glasses that are too strong for you. I close my eyes against the pain, and try to focus again. There is also a low level of emotional panic and struggle that underlies the dream.

I always wake up from these dreams feeling exhausted. I never remember having one before this year, but I can think of three times relatively recently when I've dreamt in cubism.

I just chase my tail when I try to interpret the thing. The storyline is easy to make sense of. But the cubism? Am I focusing too hard on the little things, or not hard enough? Is my view of the world distorted? Have I forgotten the big picture, or am I just incapable of seeing it? Or is a sight interpretation too literal? Is it about the struggle? Overcoming the panic? A message to stop fighting the current and go with things the way they are?