02-27-02 @ 7:00 pm EST

**stares unhungrily at Arby's sandwich**

I think I might be beginning to understand the World Trade Center dreams I keep having. (Didn't have one last night, but had three in the past month.)

From Yahoo! Group 0001DreamJournals:

It took me fully two months after the incident for me to have my first World Trade Center dream. It concerned me first visiting a website dedicated to it, then somehow ending up on a bizarre "tour" of the subterranean ruins. Beneath the rubble my group and I came to a sort of Victorian or British house far underground, with tea and a butler and everything. We stopped to rest here before continuing with the tour.

That was the only WTC dream I remember until the past few days. Lately it's been popping up again for some reason, nearly a half a year after the disaster. In one dream I was being driven around some wild country just outside New York City and I looked up at the skyline on the other side of the river (I'm not from New York, nor have I ever been there) to search for the WTC; I find myself doing this in real life whenever I see pictures of cityscapes. It wasn't there, of course, but as I stared harder I could finally see its ghost, two hazy transparent towers looming above the city.

A couple of nights after that I dreamed I was out over a great body of water with a woman, I don't know who, but for some unexplained reason I suddenly started looking around for the Twin Towers.

And a couple of nights after that, last night in fact, I dreamed I was sitting in some sort of auditorium with many other people. We were discussing...World Trade Center dreams we had had. Others were recounting their own, but everyone was far too flippant and amused about it. They all smiled and joked and laughed as they spoke. I sat and pondered whether I should share my own dreams, yet I felt disturbed. Why were they taking it so lightly?

This is what I wonder myself, why I'm suddenly having all these dreams. At first I wondered why it took me two months to have the first one, but now with the Towers popping up the past several nights running, I don't really get it at all. It feels far too delayed and "after the fact," not to mention obsessive.

Another odd thing. The "Challenger" disaster in the Eighties I found horrid, just as horrid back then as I find the WTC now. One of those "I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing" incidents. I still cry whenever I see either one on TV. Yet I never remember having so much as a single dream about that. It's strange.

Now maybe on a superficial level, the Towers DO represent the...Towers. But I tried looking at what's been bothering me lately, to see if the dreams have a reason to show up now of all times. The first dream with the tour, I don't understand. The second batch of three seem to go together. Take a look at this.

A tower = something that looms over you, tall and menacing; in this context, something I've been obsessing about incessantly. (I still collect magazines with their pictures.) There are two of them.

I just noticed that in the past few days (just after the dreams started), two primary things have been bothering me:

*The "return" of my avoidance
*My temporary "writer's block"

Two things that are towering over me, making me feel small and useless. Two things I've been obsessing about (just look at this journal).

Yet there's another aspect here when you look at the "Ghost Towers" dream. There,

World Trade Center = something which doesn't exist anymore; a ghost of itself, something I continue to search for in every skyline, even where and when I know I won't find it. Something beyond reach, that has been gone a long time.

Things that at the moment seem to be mere ghosts of what they once were, that I can't seem to find wherever I look (and believe me, I've been looking like mad)--confidence, and inspiration.

Two things that should be standing tall, yet fell somewhere along the way for some reason, and I can't seem to find them no matter where I look. They aren't on any skyline.

The dream with the water? I'm not really sure. Water and women often represent emotional aspects, plus the water could also be the subconscious; that's all I know.

The dream with the people laughing about their WTC dreams: People who see my anxieties and laugh them off as worthless/not worth worrying about, or else people with their own problems and worries--yet they're working them out, or at least seem to be, much more easily than I am. They can laugh it off since it's so easy--at least, that's what I'm seeing them do. I sit with my obsessive little dream and wonder why I can't laugh it off the way they can, why it's so easy for them and not for me. I resent them for being so flippant and easygoing.

Others don't scour skylines looking for nonexistent towers anymore. They sift through the rubble, salvage what they can, then build new ones. I sit and look over the same and the wrong skylines day after day, when I know I won't find what I need standing there anymore. Do I look for a ghost to cling to or do I build a new one?

Well, I'm starting to feel stupid now. Like I know what I'm talking about. When all is said and done, maybe a tower is just a tower after all. But it made me think.

Gotta go. Maybe I'll try again to write.