Swallowed by Gum

This dream is long gone now and does not bother me any more. But when I was a teenager, I was tortured by it regularly and woke up from it often as if I was living in a horror movie.

The dream always started out with me spitting out a piece of gum, completely chewed out of its taste and flavor, into lush grass somewhere in a beautiful place like a park or green summer mountains. It was my favorite, too, Bubble Gum - one of the few luxuries from the West we had access to in my Soviet childhood. We called it "BOOBLE GOOM" and to this day whenever I hear the name Michael Bublé I have a chuckle.

But back to my dream: As I turn around to leave, the gum starts to grow, swallowing everything in its way and turning the space around it into a desert wasteland.

Scared, I start running away. When I run, the pile of gum grows at the speed I run. The faster I run, the bigger it becomes. When it grows to the size of a Himalayan mountain, I begin feeling how it slowly swallows me, dragging me in by my heels, and then enveloping my entire body. The more I kick, swerve and try to free myself, the more I get gummed in: Up to my knees first, then to the waist, then all the way up to the chest.

Toward the end, I feel constrained and immobile, like being gradually swallowed in by a giant python. Too many times I woke up when I could feel the gum monster's sticky fingers feeling around my neck. On those occasions, I had trouble breathing in my dream. I'd force myself to wake up by bolting in the bed, wide-eyed and sweating, and frantically feeling out my neck and my surroundings, making sure that the gum was nowhere near me.

As it was a lucid dream (most of the times, I knew in my dream I was dreaming a nightmare), over time I figured out a trick: If I stopped running away from the gum mountain, it would stop growing, halt. If I turned around and walked toward it, it would start retreating and getting smaller, and the space around it would be slowly turning back into a luscious green paradise. At the end, it would shrink to the size of my original chewed-up Booble Goom, and I could easily pick it up, pack it into its original wrapper that I still had in my pocket, and throw it into a trashcan.

Now, of the hundreds of times I had that dream, how many times do you recon I reversed the mountain? - Not more than a dozen, I'd estimate. Lucid dream management is hard, and horror dream management is even harder. It is virtually impossible to tell your body, "Stop, relax, and turn around" when it's in the survival flight mode. But that's why it is also so memorable: On those occasions where I ended up packing up the gum for the trashcan, I felt like I'd achieved something big and incredible. I also developed a good habit for life: I always save my gum wrapper so that I could later wrap and discard the gum properly into a trashcan.

My grandmother, who was great at interpreting people's dreams (she was naturally good at understanding human psychology without any formal education) always said when I shared that dream with her that it meant one of two things: (1) symbolizing my growing pains that I could not run away from or (2) symbolizing my fears and anxieties that I needed to face and manage. It does make sense, when you think about it.

But looking back on it now, when I don't have that nightmare dream anymore, I also think it had a strong environmental message: Don't spit your gum onto paradise, people! Pack it up and discard it properly.