What do running dreams mean again?

So last night (the night before my big interview), I had an intriguing, at times disturbing, and (as usual with my dreams) quite odd.

The dream started with me sharing a house as I did back at university, and in the dream it was in the city where I went to university (although the geography eventually proved to be quite different, as it usually is with dream places).

I was assigned the flat at the highest point in the building (we did have separate flats), because I was the one with the least social capital in the group, it seemed. There wasn't a lot to the starting episode of the dream, but the two key events were both similar. Someone else entered my flat and rearranged things there. I found this disturbing - a betrayal, and an invasion of privacy and my personal space (I'm not going to draw any conclusions about how the dream related to that job interview that I was expecting!) The second time, the flat had been given a complete makeover, and my old and battered bed had been thrown out. The problem was, the makeover had not included a replacement bed for me to sleep on. I felt very disturbed and anxious about this fact, and so I decided that I would go out and try to find my old mattress, or a replacement!

This ushered in the next part of the dream.

I set off, naked (because I was getting ready for bed, I suppose, and I sleep in the nude usually), into the dusk to go and find where they had dumped my mattress, or to find somewhere that would sell me a new one. I was jogging or running through the streets, looking for likely dumping sites for a mattress (for some reason, I was sure that they would have fly-tipped the mattress, not taken it to a proper rubbish dump). I had bare feet and could feel them against the cold, wet tarmac of the pavement.

Early on, there was a police van and a police motorcycle approaching as I went to cross the road (the image was lifted straight from a memory of a protest march I was on, but the weather and time of day was different). I weaved between them, and dodged the officers' half-hearted attempts to catch me (they didn't bother to give chase). Then I was off to find my mattress!

There were several paths that I followed, largely staying away from the roads but choosing to go up the back alleyways - some of the surroundings were settings from the city I went to uni, others were similar but invented by my imagination. At one point, I went through a pub's beer garden that was out the back of the pub. There were people there, who looked quizzically at me but didn't seem perturbed by the naked runner.

Of course, there were hazards for a bare-footed runner in a run-down part of a dirty city. I dodged broken glass, used needles, and the like with care and ease as I accelerated on my course.

As my run went on, my pace became faster. The anxiety and anger that had fuelled me before faded with time, and eventually my original purpose faded into the background as well, and as they faded, I ran more quickly. It wasn't for the sheer joy of running, but just because I was running and there was no reason to stop, and I was naked and that was okay.

Towards the top of the hill, I came to a secondary school. It was now deep into night time, and it seemed natural to run through rather than round the school (and for some reason, I think I thought there would be a mattress in the school). It was a familiar school, it felt like one where I had been when I was young (but the layout wasn't anything like the one I really went to). I went through the showers and changing rooms for PE, I ran down the corridors. There were people there - pupils mostly, but a few teachers as well (what they were doing there in the middle of the night, I don't know). My pace increased again - I wanted to get out of there, away from the people who might not understand a naked guy running through a school full of young teens. I ducked through the loos (both boys' and girls' - in the dream they were directly connected, which seems odd now but seemed perfectly natural in the dream). I hurtled through them (my pace still steadily increasing as the dream progressed) and swerved down the corridor, towards the front door of the school, which was where I had expected to emerge when I first ever entered the building. By now, I could hear people talking about there being a streaker in the school, referring to me.

As I came to the lobby area, there were a few police officers and a gathering of teachers there, and pupils wandering about going to their lessons (it was finally daylight again now).

In the dream, I thought quickly. I wanted to show that I meant no harm, that I was just celebrating the movement of the human body in full freedom. That I was certainly not a threat in any way to the children at the school. So, I put up my hands in surrender.

Then I realised that this might actually send the wrong image as a naked man displaying himself openly (my cock was completely flaccid in the dream throughout). So, maintaining a posture that was proud and not at all embarrassed by my nudity, I moved my hands to cover my crotch, and waited for the decision of the police.

It never came, because at that point, I woke up.

***

I don't have a clue what it means. However, the emotional journey is an intriguing one, because of the parallels it has in my history. It seems to be going from a point of feeling insecure and dependent/subservient to others, through a sense of betrayal and violation by those others, to searching for a means of recovery, to being completely comfortable in myself but in a way that ultimately is not (yet) deemed socially acceptable. That journey, when I write it out like that, certainly sounds familiar when I think about everything I've written on this blog about my past, particularly about coming to terms with my sadism. However, I am not certain that that is actually what it is. Arguably, it could just as much be about the way I view the job that I applied for and what it would mean if I got it, or about any number of other things that I choose not to try to figure out right now. It was a dream, and an interesting story, with an emotional arc that resonates in various ways in my life. Let's leave it there.