The Busy, Busy Bees
“The best thing about dreams is that fleeting moment, when you are between sleep and waking, when you don’t know the difference between reality and fantasy, when for just that one moment you feel with your entire soul that the dream is reality, and it really happened.”
I have a tendency to dream with bizarre coherence. My dreams are vivid and typically “story-like” in structure. There seems to be a logical flow of time with a sequence of events that appears to make sense to me in the dream, but upon waking I am often curious by the nature of the content. Where do these things come from, because I often dream things that have no relationship to anything I might have seen or experienced in my waking life – nor that I could have easily imagined. I have wondered if perhaps our dreams allow us to tap into a subconscious universe of energy and thought. It’s exciting to think that some of the other 90% of our brains that we aren’t using is activating in our sleep. Whatever the case, I dreamt last night.
I was disappointed to wake up in the middle of a happy dream that seemed to me just to be an exercise in self-fulfillment. I always wish I had the power to go back to sleep and just pick the dream up from where I left off when they are so genuinely satisfying. Unfortunately, when I willed myself back to sleep it was to dream of something altogether different.
I sometimes do not remember large parts of my dreams beyond having a vague idea of the circumstances and activities playing out, but there will be points of extremely vivid memory for me. In the one last night I disturbed a small net unwittingly that had been thrown over a large group of bees. The upsetting of the net set the bees free, and they swarmed over my feet. I could feel the heat from their soft, compact bodies which were unusually large, very large. At first, my heart pounded in the instinctual anxiety that comes when a bee flies near or lands on you, but as I calmed I recognized them as the benevolent sort of honeybees that would not hurt me if I was very careful. I could not disturb them so I sat still with my legs stretched out watching them crawl all over themselves, completely obscuring my skin from view, and waited for them to drop off on their own. All the while, though there was the surprising heat, the prickle of their hard, tiny feet on my skin, they did not hurt me. Every so often one would drop off and I’d shake my foot a bit to try to dislodge others. Eventually after long, tense moments the bees were all gone. I was relieved and a little surprised because I realized afterward that they had been eating away the dead skin and calluses from my feet leaving them very smooth and fresh feeling.
