I dreamt about 9-11 early this morning, having watched Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” last night. I don’t know why, because there’s nothing in the movie that obviously connects to such an event. And I didn’t think or read about 9-11 yesterday, so I think in some way this movie did something. I’m not even a horror fan but this movie kind of blew me away; one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen.
This will be a somewhat unusual post, because I’d like to talk about those relatively few times that I’ve had intense dreams after reading or watching something — usually a classic novel or movie, because that’s how my tastes run.
There’s nothing too personal in these dreams, and hopefully this may be of some interest. At the very least, for those who have read or watched these classics, it may be of interest to see what great scenes were the ones that stirred dreams.
I noted these dreams down when they occurred or a short time afterward, and I’ve reproduced those notes below.
I’ve had intense dreams after:
- watching the 2012 movie musical of “Les Miserables”
- finishing “The Birchbark House” novel
- reading about the fight for the corpse of Patroclus in the “Iliad”
- reading the chapter in the “Iliad” in which Achilles is nearly caught by a raging river that comes to life; the same dream continued the next night after finishing the chapter in which Achilles kills Hector
- reading about the disappearance of Dante’s guide Virgil and the subsequent arrival of his love Beatrice in “The Divine Comedy”
- watching Kubrick’s “The Shining” for the first time
All of these stories/chapters are either dreamlike or literally have to do with characters who dream. My dream after Le Miz had to do with a tiger and was connected to Fantine’s sorrowful song, “I Dreamed A Dream”. In “The Birchbark House”, characters often have important dreams; and some tell spooky folk tales. The importance of dreams at dawn is a recurring theme in “The Divine Comedy”; and the chapter in which Beatrice takes Virgil’s place at Dante’s side is, as readers of the Commedia know, one of the most emotional passages in the journey. A dreamlike mist shrouds the combatants fighting over the corpse of Patroclus in “The Iliad,” on an otherwise sunny day. Achilles tries later to get away from the waves of a suddenly murderous river and, as in dreams, is unable. As for Kubrick’s “Shining”, there is Danny, who has visions in his “sleep”; and the spirits in the hotel appear as they do in dreams, randomly and mysteriously, particularly when they show up right in front of Wendy as she’s running helplessly and aimlessly through large hallways and strange rooms.
June 2023 (after watching “Les Miserables”)
During the movie I understood something new in that famous line, “But the tigers come at night”. The movie suggested, to me, that Fantine’s customers were the tigers.
I dreamt that there was a large tiger in the grass outside our Massachusetts apartment, hanging out with a mama bear and her cubs. The animals drew public attention and wouldn’t go away. My son Jacob was out of doors too much for my comfort, and I just couldn’t get him to stay inside. At one point he was facing our doorway and about to come back in, when I saw the tiger at the top of a tall van, ready to pounce on him. I felt that it was too late, and that I was about to lose him, but I said to myself, “Too late unless it’s not.” And whether it was lucid dreaming, or what, I don’t know, but the tiger never attacked. Jacob did not come in, either, but the dream ended.
Summer 2021 (one year after finishing “The Birchbark House”)
The first in the series of “Birchbark” novels may be Young Adult, but it was dark enough to trouble my dreams the night that I finished it. It was the first fiction I’d read in many years, and it was stirring things up.
Anyone who has read the “Birchbark” books knows that the characters often have significant dreams at night; it’s a recurring theme. I don’t typically have dreams in response to books, so I wonder if I dreamt about “Birchbark” as a kind of way to join what the characters themselves were doing. It’s been a year and I cannot remember the details of my dream, but it was a sorrowful one.
Summer 2024 (reading “The Iliad”)
The fight for the corpse of Patroclus, in Book XVII of “The Iliad”:
He urged them to stay clustered round the corpse,
prepared to fight in combat hand to hand.
Gigantic Ajax gave the troops these orders
and soon the ground was wet with dark red blood.
Packed closely side by side, the men fell dead—
the Trojans, noble allies, and the Greeks.
The battle cost the Greeks some loss of blood,
although far fewer died because they always
kept close to one another in the throng
and saved each other’s lives. They fought like fire,
and you would think the sun and moon were gone,
because the battle of the finest fighters
around the dead Patroclus was so shrouded
in fog. The other well-armed Greeks and Trojans
fought unimpeded, beneath clear, bright skies,
with dazzling sunlight shining down upon them.
The day after reading this, I woke up in the middle of a Holocaust dream. I was part of a group of unsuspecting men and women who were going to be taken down, for unknown reasons, to a closed room at the bottom of a stairway in a house. There was nothing obviously suspect or out of place about the house, the room, or the situation, except the mysterious reason, and a low-key uncertainty. The downstairs room contained a large bed, but it did not seem to be a bedroom and none of us took the bed to be there for any purpose, it was simply there. We were a large enough group to fill the room, standing. I looked around and in one corner there emerged, slowly as in dreams, a device that I took to be a possible emitter of gas, and it was. Then I knew why we were there, though the dream did not proceed to the gassing, and I never experienced anything like shock or even fear; it was only when I woke up sometime later that I realized what I’d been dreaming.
I had another intense dream later, after “The River” chapter, in which the river Scamander tries to murder Achilles. The same dream continued the next night, after the death of Hector. Homer describes Hector fleeing from Achilles in much the same way as Achilles had tried to run from the river. Unfortunately the details of the dream were soon lost; only a feeling remains, of fleeing from water.
October 2024 (while reading “The Divine Comedy”)
After reading Purgatorio cantos 28-30, I woke up with a vivid dream at dawn — at an hour in which, as we keep reading in the Divine Comedy, dreams are full of truth, or foretell the future. I had been struggling with the Purgatorio and particularly its dense symbolism, but this three-canto stretch woke me up, partly because of the sad departure of Virgil but even more so because of Beatrice’s arrival. In Canto 29 there is a vivid reminder of Phaeton’s chariot scouring the sky, and a description of the Griffon and its “wing-tips”.
I dreamt that I was on a landscape divided in half; I was on the darker side, the one cast in night. It was not a fearful place, and I was moving about with freedom, possibly with brief moments in the lightened landscape (my memory is fuzzy and I’m recording these details a few days out). What stands out is what I saw in the night sky. Some kind of moving object, which may have resembled a chariot but was definitely a vehicle of travel, appeared inside a circle (of clouds?), appearing each time I looked with increasing clarity, until it was framed by the encircling film of clouds. In that same section of sky, a little later, I saw an airplane flying very slowly, descending to the ground; but there was no sense of destruction in any of this. The plane rolled over and its right wing actually cut softly through the ground for a short while; and then the dream changed or I woke up.
Today (after watching “The Shining”)
I dreamt about burning towers, but nothing about airplanes. I was there, and then I was watching from a great distance; and I kept hoping that the towers would stay up. Very slowly the top half of each tower was tilting over, almost imperceptibly. They were not rectangles like the real towers; they were topped with spires, like the Chrysler building or the spiral of Notre Dame. Two towers became one, and it finally cracked in half; the spiraled top fell to the ground.
Incidentally I have dreamt about 9-11 before, about a dozen years ago. Stressed out and underslept, we finally got away with our baby for a weekend in the country. On the first night, I slept deeply. Things were so quiet outside compared to New York that it was actually a little unsettling to fall asleep.