hand-me-down experiences

So for many months now, I've been dreamless. But last night I dreamt that monkeys were raping human women. There was nothing graphic in the dream; nothing perverse even.

It seemed the natural thing for them to do; to turn from senselessly, indifferently, raping male and female members of their own kind to doing it to a different kind.

I wasn't being raped.

And I couldn't identify any of those who were being raped.

Everything was anonymous and figures had turned landscapial - as if there was nothing the human verge hadn't experienced and made ordinary.

Funnily, I didn't wake with that jolty feeling that accompanies vivid, weird dreams.

I'm not about to do some sort of Freudian analysis or issue myself for dream-ironing therapy, but since I don't night-dream so often, I thought I'd think about this one I've had. But like most times when I get my thoughts to purposively attend to something, I blocked up and suddenly all I could remember was Auden's "The Shield of Achilles".

And so I feel sometimes that every experience I have for the rest of my life will only be understood by the things I've read and the skin I was given to feel them. This bugs me.