Barn Burner

Okay, this is getting weird now.

I’ve been on a wild journey down nightmare alley for the last several evenings while recuperating from a nasty cold.

There was the David Letterman comedy show fiasco that I described in last week’s post.

But prior to that I dreamed that I met up with an old frenemy I haven’t seen since the Eighties and another instance where I had a telephone chat with a long-lost girlfriend.

I believe these are both straightforward examples of wish fulfillment.

In the case of the frenemy, my subconscious mind wanted to bring back the friend part of this guy’s personality and ditch the enemy, the one who liked to mock me in front of other people and then claim it was all a joke.

The ex-girlfriend call was a case of letting her know that I was okay, that I had recovered from that distant time when she quite rightly parted ways with me.

I was a mess back then, to be honest, and I was doing nothing to climb out of the hole I had dug for myself. There was no sane reason for her to stick around and wait for me to de-crazy.

Many relationships go south; that’s a fact of life. But there’s a difference between losing control of your car and aiming it straight for a brick wall and flooring the pedal.

Now in my latest bit of midnight mania, I was walking with my sister down 69th Street toward Fifth Avenue in our neighborhood in Bay Ridge.

I could see the marquee of the Alpine Theater, where we went to the movies so many times when we were kids, and beyond that, I saw flames from a massive fire tearing through the houses on the next block over.

At some point in this after-dark delusion, I was working out a gym that looked nothing like my real-world health club, but I was getting agitated because I had left my sister hanging.

House Afire

And then I was walking down my old street where my family’s house is located. Of course, it isn’t our house anymore, but in this dream, I was worried the place had been looted.

When I arrived, I saw that the front door had been blown off and the porch was filled with burned-up debris.

I ran around to the side entrance convinced I’d find the place picked clean. When I entered the home, I saw that rather ripping the place off, someone had tidied up.

There was a nice table set up with my laptop computer from work, a widescreen TV, which I initially thought had been stolen, had been placed carefully in a corner, and somebody had swept the floor.

And that’s a wrap.

Okay, once again there are several tons of mental material here to unpack and analyze.

The gym scene reflects my disappointment about not being able to work out, while the guilt I felt about abandoning my sister was real, but may also include fears of losing my loved ones.

Fires in dreams can symbolize powerful forces like intense emotions, transformation, purification, destruction, and spiritual energy. A house fire can signal fear of loss or change, while a raging wildfire can mean being overwhelmed or a need for renewal often reflecting subconscious feelings about control, passion, or danger in your waking life.

I was feeling vulnerable last week, and those fears probably ignited the fire in my dreams.

The neat interior was a reminder that I have yet to do the much-needed clean-up of my own home—it’s been a top New Year’s resolution since I moved in here more than a decade ago.

I finally got back to gym on Saturday, confessed my fantasy desertion to my sister, and relaxed for most of the day.

Tonight, I’d like to get some peaceful sleep, but I’m going to keep a fire extinguisher handy just in case.