Here's an excerpt from my blog - Marley Bone Coach:
"I thought one wasn't supposed to be able to experience pain in one's dreams, that one would awake just before the feeling the pain. I am not referring to emotional pain, or some other abstract, affective pain, but rather to full-on physical pain. For myself anyway, I have just proven that theory to be wrong.
The dream began innocently enough. I was driving around looking for a parking space on the streets surrounding the campus of one of the universities I have attended. There was this street with lots of spaces, just beyond some spots reserved for the handicapped. I parked my car and got out to look at the street signs to make sure I wasn't parked illegally. Everything was OK, and there wasn't even a meter to pay, but I didn't believe it, having some feelings of doubt that I must be missing something and that I might be ticketed or towed if I left my car there. There was a cop not far away, so I called over to him. He had already noticed me looking at the signs and answered that I was fine. With lingering feelings of mistrust, I went on my way.
The street then sort of washed over, turning into the classroom for which I was headed. I don't recall much about the class, except that it was led by one of my favorite junior high school teachers. In reality, he was a very intense man, and this intensity was not positive. He had some form of albinism, and was rumored to be homosexual, and therefore faced unbearable taunting from the bratty little kids who made up the student population of my junior high school. He would often snap, and in fits of anger would throw his briefcase or some such thing across his classroom over the heads of his students, which only fueled their malicious behavior. Despite these momentary losses of control on his part, and his general anger that simmered just below the boiling point all the time, he still received a much-deserved promotion to teach ninth-grade honors English. This promotion took effect just in time for me to be in his class before I moved on to high school. However, although he was an exceptional teacher, this angry intensity of which I write lent itself to the tone of my dream.
The only other thing I remember about that part of the dream is that the teacher exited the classroom with an assignment left on the chalkboard. There were two words written side by side. The first word was "death." The second word I don't recall except that it was in no way a synonym or antonym or in any way obviously complementary or supplementary to the word "death" except in that it was also a word evoking fundamentally primitive emotion. All that was written were the two words, and I could not recall any instruction from the teacher what to do with the two words, whether we were to compose an essay on them or anything else. I tried to ask my nearby classmates what the assignment was, but they either did not know or seemed to regard it as a pop quiz and that we were supposed to be working on the assignment and that any communication between us would be cheating.
This situation caused me a great deal of cognitive dissonance. This was resolved, very uncomfortably, mind you, in the following manner. The two words composed a measurement in which only the end-point was known death. The starting point was either vague or unknown, which perhaps explains why I cannot remember the second word, meaning perhaps I never knew it in the dream or it was just not relevant enough to gain any focus.
The classroom then changed back to the street where my car was parked. The other students who did not know what to do either were also there, all trying to complete the assignment in whatever way they felt most appropriate. Some were banging gongs and clashing cymbals and playing strange horns, generally making a chaotic racket. They appeared as the Blue Meanies from the Beatles animated film "Yellow Submarine." Other students were fighting small battles, or torturing innocents, or raping children, all like demons out of some Hieronymus Bosch painting.
My answer was to be found in a laboratory at the end of the block, to which the pandemonium of the street diminished. A graduate student was measuring the distance between points on a random curve, which undulated along a horizontal plane made of bits of crude cardboard that spanned the length of the lab, and the wall perpendicular to the plane and horizontal to the axis of the curve, so that the student was between the curve and the wall, making his measurements as he went along. The wall had no regular surface, as if it was stuccoed with charcoal and then burned, so that no precise measurement could begin from its pitted and fragile surface. The student would always make several measurements at each point, at varying degrees into the wall. Somehow, all this made perfect sense to him, like all the measurements made at a particular point were equivalent. In frustration over my own lack of understanding, I began to argue with him about what he was doing, how he must find a true starting point on the wall, and begin his measurements from exactly where the wall began, rather than jamming the device deep into the wall's surface.
His advisor then came up to me to explain why the starting point did not matter. He showed me how the wall had been made, and how the pits in the wall were made by flocks of birds that flew up to the wall and pecked their beaks into it. This explanation only confused me more. Therefore, the professor demonstrated the process on my hand. Birds flew up to peck away at my palm, and I began to scream out in pain. I looked at the professor and noticed his long, dreadlocked hair and beard in which thousands of glistening, gelatinous, amphibian eggs had been laid. Their arrangement was chaotic, and suddenly I understood somehow the solution to the assignment. I understood the imprecise nature of the unknown starting point and infinitely precise nature of the end point "death."
The pain in my hand then flared. The birds pecking at my palm had become a single animal with no tail and a head on each end. One head was that of a bird and the other of a rat, and they had dug themselves deep into my hand. Then streams of part bird-like, part rat-like creatures flew out. Somehow out of all this I gave birth from my hand two children, both hideously deformed and retarded.
The next thing I remember was waking up screaming. My arm was stiff, and it was a second or two before my brain would release its lock on my muscles and I could move my hand. Not until then did the pain go away."
"I thought one wasn't supposed to be able to experience pain in one's dreams, that one would awake just before the feeling the pain. I am not referring to emotional pain, or some other abstract, affective pain, but rather to full-on physical pain. For myself anyway, I have just proven that theory to be wrong.
The dream began innocently enough. I was driving around looking for a parking space on the streets surrounding the campus of one of the universities I have attended. There was this street with lots of spaces, just beyond some spots reserved for the handicapped. I parked my car and got out to look at the street signs to make sure I wasn't parked illegally. Everything was OK, and there wasn't even a meter to pay, but I didn't believe it, having some feelings of doubt that I must be missing something and that I might be ticketed or towed if I left my car there. There was a cop not far away, so I called over to him. He had already noticed me looking at the signs and answered that I was fine. With lingering feelings of mistrust, I went on my way.
The street then sort of washed over, turning into the classroom for which I was headed. I don't recall much about the class, except that it was led by one of my favorite junior high school teachers. In reality, he was a very intense man, and this intensity was not positive. He had some form of albinism, and was rumored to be homosexual, and therefore faced unbearable taunting from the bratty little kids who made up the student population of my junior high school. He would often snap, and in fits of anger would throw his briefcase or some such thing across his classroom over the heads of his students, which only fueled their malicious behavior. Despite these momentary losses of control on his part, and his general anger that simmered just below the boiling point all the time, he still received a much-deserved promotion to teach ninth-grade honors English. This promotion took effect just in time for me to be in his class before I moved on to high school. However, although he was an exceptional teacher, this angry intensity of which I write lent itself to the tone of my dream.
The only other thing I remember about that part of the dream is that the teacher exited the classroom with an assignment left on the chalkboard. There were two words written side by side. The first word was "death." The second word I don't recall except that it was in no way a synonym or antonym or in any way obviously complementary or supplementary to the word "death" except in that it was also a word evoking fundamentally primitive emotion. All that was written were the two words, and I could not recall any instruction from the teacher what to do with the two words, whether we were to compose an essay on them or anything else. I tried to ask my nearby classmates what the assignment was, but they either did not know or seemed to regard it as a pop quiz and that we were supposed to be working on the assignment and that any communication between us would be cheating.
This situation caused me a great deal of cognitive dissonance. This was resolved, very uncomfortably, mind you, in the following manner. The two words composed a measurement in which only the end-point was known death. The starting point was either vague or unknown, which perhaps explains why I cannot remember the second word, meaning perhaps I never knew it in the dream or it was just not relevant enough to gain any focus.
The classroom then changed back to the street where my car was parked. The other students who did not know what to do either were also there, all trying to complete the assignment in whatever way they felt most appropriate. Some were banging gongs and clashing cymbals and playing strange horns, generally making a chaotic racket. They appeared as the Blue Meanies from the Beatles animated film "Yellow Submarine." Other students were fighting small battles, or torturing innocents, or raping children, all like demons out of some Hieronymus Bosch painting.
My answer was to be found in a laboratory at the end of the block, to which the pandemonium of the street diminished. A graduate student was measuring the distance between points on a random curve, which undulated along a horizontal plane made of bits of crude cardboard that spanned the length of the lab, and the wall perpendicular to the plane and horizontal to the axis of the curve, so that the student was between the curve and the wall, making his measurements as he went along. The wall had no regular surface, as if it was stuccoed with charcoal and then burned, so that no precise measurement could begin from its pitted and fragile surface. The student would always make several measurements at each point, at varying degrees into the wall. Somehow, all this made perfect sense to him, like all the measurements made at a particular point were equivalent. In frustration over my own lack of understanding, I began to argue with him about what he was doing, how he must find a true starting point on the wall, and begin his measurements from exactly where the wall began, rather than jamming the device deep into the wall's surface.
His advisor then came up to me to explain why the starting point did not matter. He showed me how the wall had been made, and how the pits in the wall were made by flocks of birds that flew up to the wall and pecked their beaks into it. This explanation only confused me more. Therefore, the professor demonstrated the process on my hand. Birds flew up to peck away at my palm, and I began to scream out in pain. I looked at the professor and noticed his long, dreadlocked hair and beard in which thousands of glistening, gelatinous, amphibian eggs had been laid. Their arrangement was chaotic, and suddenly I understood somehow the solution to the assignment. I understood the imprecise nature of the unknown starting point and infinitely precise nature of the end point "death."
The pain in my hand then flared. The birds pecking at my palm had become a single animal with no tail and a head on each end. One head was that of a bird and the other of a rat, and they had dug themselves deep into my hand. Then streams of part bird-like, part rat-like creatures flew out. Somehow out of all this I gave birth from my hand two children, both hideously deformed and retarded.
The next thing I remember was waking up screaming. My arm was stiff, and it was a second or two before my brain would release its lock on my muscles and I could move my hand. Not until then did the pain go away."