King Kong's limousine and other nicotine dreams

Last night I slept with a nicotine patch on, curious about the unusually vivid dreams which are a known side effect of doing so. This is about as close as I've ever come to "experimenting with drugs," unless you count the nutmeg incident.

Vivid dreams were delivered as advertised. I remember three of them.

1.

In the first dream, I was exploring a forest with a few other people. Deep in the woods I found an enormous white vehicle, apparently abandoned, and I said excitedly, "Guys, I think I just found King Kong's limousine!"

I climbed up to the top of the vehicle and went in an open window. Inside, I found a cash register. A sign on the register had a headshot of a gorilla and said something like, "I don't have to give you a receipt because I'm a gorilla." There was fine print underneath about how gorillas are not subject to the regulations of the EU. I thought this was very witty and took a photo.

I climbed out the window and up onto the top of the vehicle. That's when I discovered that it wasn't actually a single huge vehicle but rather four white automobiles stacked one on top of another. My climbing upset the balance, and the upper cars slid down and began rolling down the street (there was a street now) out of control. They were going the wrong direction, and drivers were swerving to avoid hitting them. I regretted climbing up on top of the car; if I had stayed inside, with the cash register, I would have been able to put on the brakes.

I was concerned that if the cars kept going, they would end up plunging into the sea and disturbing the whales and dolphins.

2.

In the second dream, my parents and siblings and I, all more or less our current ages, were moving back into the house in Derry, New Hampshire, where I had lived between the ages of two and seven. We were driving there in a Jaguar SUV which had a special feature: You could connect your luggage to the back of your seat, and then when you arrived you could take out the whole seat, which had wheels on it, and use it as a convenient way to transport your luggage. My dad was the only one to use this special feature; the rest of us moved out luggage around the old-fashioned way. "This is a Jaguar," he said. "We should take advantage of its features."

The house in Derry was very large and still had all our things in it from when we had lived there back in the 1980s -- but everything was clean and in good repair and showed no signs of having been abandoned for decades. The living room was illuminated by thousands of white Christmas lights hanging from the ceiling. As we passed a couple of small bookcases, I said, "I remember this was back before we had that many books." One of the walls had three portraits on it: my father, my mother, and between them a Black woman I didn't recognize. White birch trees were visible through the window, and my dad starting singing to himself, "Oh, the birches seemed dreamlike on account of that frostin' . . . ."

I found it emotionally overwhelming to be back in Derry. I kept thinking to myself how much better it was than anywhere else we had ever lived, and what a mistake it had been to leave. I thought I would definitely go to church on Sunday, even though there were probably few people I remembered remaining in the local congregation. I thought of a particular family, the Carders (I mentally pronounced it the New England way, dropping the r's), who had a pumpkin farm, and figured they would probably still be around.

3.

In the third dream, I had just finished teaching an English class, and the students and I were all going downstairs to the lobby. I realized that one of the students had forgotten something on his desk, and for some reason instead of sending him back upstairs to get it, I went myself. I was disoriented at first because I found that the layout of the classroom had been rotated 90 degrees. The board, which had been on the south wall, was now on the west wall, and all the desks were facing it. I couldn't figure out who had rearranged everything or how they had done it so quickly -- we had only been out of the classroom for a few seconds.

I found the desk where the student had left one of his books, and I discovered to my annoyance that someone had also left some trash in the little shelf under the desktop -- some kind of plastic wrapper and, I was surprised to find, a fork. The fork had four silver tines, and the handle was made of a hard green material and was decorated with a leafy pattern. I picked everything up and took it downstairs. By the time I got downstairs, the book and the plastic wrapper had changed into dishes, so I just left everything in the kitchen sink.

Upon waking reflection, I suspect that the fork ties in with my recent dream about "The confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates." I dreamed of a river with a "fork" in it, and in my analysis in that post and the comments, I connected this with the river that flows out of Eden and then divides into four rivers. The green handle of the fork with its leaf pattern represents the Garden, and the silver part which divides into four tines represents the river that "was parted, and became into four heads" (Gen. 2:10).