corey venier
a commitment to dreaming
contributing writer
Sitting across from Katie I’m reminded of those first few moments of consciousness after waking up. With her big dimples, goofy expressions and loose yet charming personality, being around her has the familiar comfort and quirkiness of dreaming. And that’s what we’ve come here to talk about, the joy and hilarity in reminiscing about our dreams that are often strange, sometimes hazy, but always uniquely our own. Knowing Katie for a few years now I’ve been lucky enough to hear about her weird dreams in passing. Two immediately come to mind where in both she is fleeing the altar moments before tying the knot. I ask her to tell me about the first dream. She giggles, and recounts the dream starting with her standing in her parent’s basement, looking out into the backyard to see a wedding party. She describes the wedding seeming very casual, and everyone looking very excited. Then, realizing she’s the one about to be married off panic settles in. “I don’t remember who the groom was, only that I wanted to escape,” she tells me. Just as logic seems to fly out the window in dreams, Katie’s perfect plan to escape from her impending nuptials was, well, out the basement window. Unfortunately due to the way her parent’s house is situated, sneaking out of the basement window would’ve put her right back into the yard where the wedding was taking place. And that’s where the first dream ends. I ask Katie what her dreams were like when she was young, wondering if there was anything strange about her slumbering thoughts even from an early age. “The most interesting thing about my dreams as a kid was that I only ever remember having one nightmare where I woke up scared,” she recalls. “I remember really good feelings otherwise from my dreams when I was young.” By the time she was 13, her interest in dreams sparked Katie to keep a dream journal. One of her friends had told her by writing down her dreams, her memory of them would improve. After a few months of logging her subconscious thoughts, she was able to remember two to three of her dreams vividly long after waking up. I ask her to tell me about the second dream where she ran away from her mystery groom. She remembers this wedding being more formal, set in a hall and having an altar. “The one thing that was distinctively different about this dream, is that I was a lot more logical in how I was going to escape,” Katie tells me. In her dream, she knew she didn’t want to marry the groom-to-be since she was
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