Sunday, June 5, 2011

Three Dreams



I don't seem to be remembering my dreams nearly as well as I once did.

Maybe I'm almost all dreamt out and there's simply less to remember?

In the last month there have been only about three mornings when I've awakened and still had a few lingering sleepy-time images bouncing around inside my head.

The first dream (May 11) involved my sister visiting me in college. She spent the night in a parking space in a parking garage - no car, just a mattress and a few blankets. Apparently that wasn't anything unusual for visitors to the college. If my sister thought it was strange, she hid it well. I myself seem to have had a bed in the narrow median of a nearby interstate....

The second dream (May 30) had me sitting in a grassy area in northern Ohio about an hour before sunset. It was a nice, calm day and I was all alone as cars whizzed down a busy road in the distance. I had my Nook with me (something I've never touched, let alone owned) and was using it to visit a website run by Michael Shermer. The part of the site I was visiting had a series of simple games or tests designed to sharpen or test your thinking skills. The page I was on featured a simple schematic diagram of the underside of an upright vacuum cleaner. Various parts were numbered and you were supposed to list the numbers in the order of importance - the number of the part that contributed the most to cleaning up dust and dirt was to be put first. I got the first number right (the sucky area around the beater) but in second place I stupidly put the number that went with a small square piece of black tape that was stuck to the bottom of the base for no good or obvious reason. Doh!

The third dream from just a couple days ago was less a dream than an image of a sticker. It featured a simple line drawing of a discarded banana skin along with the words "This is pretty slick!" Apparently it was the sort of thing teachers might put on a clever piece of student writing and NOT an entry like this one.

Is there a vitamin or some other nutritional supplement one can take to improve the frequency and/or entertainment value of one's dreams? I think I need to order some!

5 comments:

  1. Sleeping in on the weekend seems to conjure up the best dreams for me. Getting enough sleep or perhaps more than enough puts me in a light-sleep state where I remember my dreams.
    This morning I felt great after waking up from a fairly intense but pointless argument with a young woman I haven't seen for about six months. The dream and argument were about a story I told or sort of a riddle I guess that I told in a misleading way that triggered a knee-jerk reaction in the audience which then made them feel foolish unless they were the kind of person who never feels foolish--which I think the story was designed to determine.
    The young woman in question is the granddaughter of one of my friends and I have a lot of paternal kind of feelings toward her. She was indignant that I'd fooled her but couldn't just say that so we argued about the story instead. It was like the cantankerous dinner discussions when my housemate was writing his philosophy PHD dissertation.
    Sitting here writing about it makes me think the dream was more about my former stepdaughter who loved logic puzzles and was more likely to passionately defend herself after being embarrassed by a logic trap than my friend's granddaughter who was acting out of character by being argumentative in my dream. On the other hand, she has a twin sister who is more assertive so who knows.
    I'd better stop now because it's past my bedtime and I could keep digging into this forever I think but I don't want to be sleep deprived tomorrow.
    Pleasant dreams.
    Hahaha. The captcha is THAUD. That's just what I thaud.

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  2. On the other hand, neither sleeping in on the weekend nor dreaming about young women who are twins is compatible with living with a significant other--or wasn't when I did.
    So maybe I should wish you unpleasant dreams.

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  3. Thanks for sharing, Deve.

    Your dreams remind me in a general way of the ones my S.O. tells me about. Hers often seem to center on relationships - usually some sort of conflict with another person. I wonder how typical that is.

    Since posting this entry I've had two dreams on two consecutive nights that I remember. Both seem to focus on spaces, not people. Specifically, impossibly large structures. One was a huge Victorian house (the roof alone covered an acre); the other was an old shopping complex with many levels and nooks. Oh, and there was a third in which a small plane crashed into a strip mall. (I didn't know anybody involved and it doesn't seem to have been much of a tragedy even though a rather large fire erupted afterwards. Oddly, that fire was some distance away from the crash....)

    I almost never dream about relationships. Or food. Maybe I'll try to change that by staring at a doughnut for awhile before going to bed tonight....

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  4. My dreams are usually very focused. What I mean is the entire dream could be re-enacted in a phone booth.
    I remember once dreaming about being at a wedding and there were a lot of people but that was very rare. The bride was there and was a girl I knew. Her family was there, but I only knew they were her family in a dreamy way. I never saw the groom and I wondered after I woke up if I was dreaming that I was the groom as directly as possible and as indirectly as necessary.
    The girl was very beautiful and of above above average intelligence and morality as girls her age and of my experience go. I dreamed about her one other time and it was more typical of my dreams. I had programmed a lamp near my bed to turn on and grow progressively brighter before my alarm clock went off. In my dream I saw her face and it seemed to be turning into the sun--then the whole thing melted away like a movie or film strip when it melts against the projector bulb. After I woke up I realized I was staring straight at the lamp I had programmed to turn on and grow brighter to wake me up. I've always wondered which came first, the dream of that girl's face or the brightening bulb.
    What I mean is I remember two dreams about her--how many unremembered dreams were there?
    Are all my dreams about girls I know? I don't think so, but they are in the majority of dreams I later over-analyse enough to remember years later. Most of my dreams vanish from my memory by afternoon, even if they were vivid and I remembered them clearly at breakfast time. Sometimes something will remind me of a dream in the afternoon and I'll be astonished to realize I had stopped thinking about it and had been on the verge of forgetting it forever, which it had seemed so real six or eight hours ago.

    The captcha is ablyacu. That seems very dreamy.

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  5. Pardon me for being presumptuous, DJ, but having just read your previous several entries, it seems to me that your dreams are reflective of your some of your (mostly) recent entries... taking into consideration that dreams often exaggerate or morph a bit from their source, still, it jumps out at me that the large and mysterious old house across the street from where you lived as a child sounds very much like the large mansion you dreamed of; and then, the big Tiedke's building, seems quite positively analogous to your dream shopping mall with many nooks, and then, or course, your dream plane fire scenario virtually jibes with both the aerial and distant photos you posted of the Tiedke's fire... seems sorta like your brain is sorting out your thoughts on what you had posted.

    As to my dreams... ha. I don't often get enough sleep to dream... much. I only remember I had a couple of rare nightmares, where I was in some sort of danger.

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