Had A Lot To Dream Last Night

My son woke up this morning, padded into the bathroom and made this comment: "I think my dreamcatcher is broken." He has one of these native American artifacts hanging in his bedroom window. Traditionally, the Ojibwa construct dreamcatchers by tying sinew strands in a web around a small round or tear-shaped frame. The resulting "dream-catcher", hung above the bed, is then used as a charm to protect sleeping children from nightmares. For those of you uninitiated, according to Lakota legend, "Good dreams pass through the center hole to the sleeping person. The bad dreams are trapped in the web, where they perish in the light of dawn." His sleep was disturbed by a vision of a twister roaring through the mountain town where we had stayed just a week and a half before, terrorizing his family and friends.
My wife's slumber was unsettled as well. She awoke with images of detritus, vast seas of castoff items - including a great many lamps - that she felt compelled to sketch once her eyes were open and focused. Not exactly traumatic, but bothersome. As for me, I had a similar experience generated in my forebrain. Mine involved climbing over piles of debris until I stumbled on a nest of hand grenades. I knew that I needed to get them away from me, or vice versa. Happily, no one was hurt before my REM cycle ended.
Why wouldn't we all have creepy dreams on one particular night. We share so much experience, it seems likely that we would share our dream time as well. From the opening of "The Last Wave" by Peter Weir: "Aborigines believe in two forms of time. Two parallel streams of activity. One is the daily objective activity to which you and I are confined. The other is an infinite spiritual cycle called the 'dreamtime,' more real than reality itself. Whatever happens in the dreamtime establishes the values, symbols, and laws of Aboriginal society. Some people of unusual spiritual powers have contact with the dreamtime." Last night I was wandering around the aftermath of a tornado that had deposited a great many lamps and hand grenades with my little family in dreamtime. No wonder I was still tired when I got out of bed this morning.