In Awl My Dreams

I had a strange dream the other night, in which a middle-aged vampire threatened me with woodworking tools she called ‘nails fashioned after those from the cross’. There’s a hell of a lot of psychology going on here, including being a destructive vampire myself, within the dream. The vampire is a sign of one’s violent/destructive side according my dream book. I’ve basically been told the book is evil though, and that I should get rid of it. I’m pretty sure that means to burn or trash it, both of which go against my cursed item policy as you may know, and against my love/respect of books.

But the tools are what stands out now, as I’ve been making some journals by hand lately, and decided last night (the second night after the dream) to look online and see if there was a better way of pre-making the holes for the thread than using a thumbtack. A couple of tutorials suggested using an awl. So I did an image search on awls… it was EXACTLY the tools I’d been threatened with in my dream. Now, I’m sure I’ve seen woodworking awls before in toolboxes, hobby shops, craft stores, and hardware stores, but I didn’t know they came in a slender bookbinding size!

Now I know I need a bookbinder’s awl. And apparently my silent self already knew.

It’s not the first strangely coincidental or seemingly prophetic dream I’ve had, I used to have a lot of them in High School. Once, I dreamed I was buying a Game Boy color (in specific colors) and a game, then the next day found that my friend had bought that and the same game. Another time I awoke knowing only that I dreamed something about the meat being bad, and that afternoon several girls had to go home because they’d eaten bologna that had sat out, and got food poisoning. Yep, the meat (and I use that term loosely) was bad.

I’ve read lots of accounts of prophetic and symbolic dreams too, including one from a study where they’d wake people up during REM and ask them what they were dreaming about. One guy they woke up twice, and each time he only gave them a single word, CAP, and TEN. A few years later he became a Captain. Prophesy, coincidence, or artificial connections?

In Freudian terms, we get the explanation that we’re either making artificial connections after the fact, or that we actually had the dream later and our brains edited things so that we feel like we had a prophetic dream. Yeah, the first one is possible for this dream, but the second one I can rule out because I occasionally journal, and I wrote down my dream in my journal because it was so full of symbolism.

Speaking of symbolism, I often see a crooked apple tree at the beginning of such dreams, though I didn’t in this last dream, I have no idea what it means. Should I check my dream reference book?