I Dreamed a Dream

True story from high school:

"Hey Kaity, you took AP Psych. Wanna analyze my dream?"

"Sure, what's it about?"

"Well it's about this giant carnivorous marshmallow and it was trying to eat me..."

"Well according to my textbook it's probably about your sexual frustration."

"Well, that's awkward..."

"Yeah..."

Lately I've been obsessed with dream analysis. The events in dreams are generally outside the control of the dreamer, unless you beat the system and realize you're dreaming before you wake up, but even then control is very limited. Many studies have concluded that most people believe that their dreams will reveal the meaningful hidden truths of their lives. This causes them to act irrationally about dreams. They try to put together unrelated information so the outcome will convey some important meaning. Before I make it sound like I'm calling dreams nonsense, let me say that most of these same studies also showed that we are irrational about our dreams the same way we are irrational in our day to day decisions. We just want to make them important.

In our seemingly never ending search for meaning, people will turn to dreams for answers and explanations. Many believe their dreams are predicting future events. Much of this is accomplished by only remembering the times it worked out and not the many times it doesn't. It is easy to take a distorted memory and retrospectively fit it into a life experience. Recalling dreams is extremely unreliable anyway, even if you're not trying to prove your own supposed premonitions. Most things only come back to you when randomly triggered by some visual or audio cue. This is where Déjà vu seems to come into things.

Some may try to keep a dream journal, (I am right now) writing in it the moment you wake up, but even this may not be perfect recall. An average 95% of your dream will never be remembered, no matter how hard you try. Even the memories we have of our waking life are constantly being changed in our minds every time you recall them. Our brains are not good at storing accurate memories, only narrative ones. So every time you run through the story in your head you're rewriting it as you go and things tend to change from one time to the next. If this is how our conscious mind works, I can only imagine how the the unconscious brain reacts when it's in the middle of a REM high and all of the junk floating around in your head is unleashed while the short-term-to-long-term-memory-converting chemicals in the brain are suppressed and then it is ripped from all of this in an instant by an annoyingly loud alarm clock. I'm not quite sure how accurate what gets written down can be. I'm imagining an anti gravity chamber with millions of blobs of different colored paint floating about...and then someone turns the gravity back on and all the paints falls strait down. I feel like being asked to remember a dream is like you're being asked to reconstruct

this --> by looking at this -->

As illustrated by the short anecdote at the beginning of this blog, we are often taught that to interpret dreams we have to understand the symbolism behind certain objects or happenings in them. I once heard if you dream of loosing your hair or teeth it actually means you're thinking of your own death. Or you could take the less gruesome, but equally creepy, approach of saying it's all about sex. This all comes back to my first point, that we are trying to make our dreams important. We are trying to find meaning beyond ourselves. It doesn't matter what it might mean to someone else. It matters what you feel and what you think of when you had the dream. The only important symbols are the ones that mean something to you. (It doesn't matter that Karen Gillan has been in my dreams, but it might matter that I'm quite in love with Amy Pond...)

A friend of mine has been helping me work through my dream journal and figuring out what it all means. I don't think it's gonna tell me any deep answers of the universe or anything. It's not like I live with a giant crack in my wall or something (if you get that, gold star). But what we've found is that the brain keeps working while you're sleeping. The dream is the brain's way of thinking and working through things while the rest of you is out of the way. While the events in the dreams have all been different, the overall theme of the dreams have in fact revealed some stuff about what my subconscious mind has been thinking about the things that occur in my waking life. The thoughts and stresses of life that I often put out of my mind, or on the back burner, resurface again through my dreams. By understanding what's truly plaguing my mind I can face it, and deal with it, and understand myself better.

I've had this recurring dream since I was ten years old. It's gotten to the point where my mind immediately knows I'm not in Kansas anymore and I can control everything I do. It's quite simple really...

I'm suddenly standing outside my house, the one I lived in when I was ten. I know that I need to find my bike, so I run up to the porch. I can choose to ride around the corner or down the street, but I can't choose both. I know it's a dream and that I'll wake up soon, so I need to move fast. I need to find her, my friend I left behind. I need to reach her before I wake up...

...but I always wake up. Many times I won't do anything for a long time, because I'm sick of being tricked. But when I don't wake up and I'm still just standing there, it almost feels so real I've been convinced I was really there and started to cry...so I try it again and wake up right as I get to her house. I sometimes think if I ever really go back to visit it might take me a while to truly believe I'm there. The strange thing is, she and I finally got back in touch (thank you facebook)...and suddenly the dream I had almost every week for thirteen years stopped. I haven't had it since. And when I see her again (hopefully soon) it really will be a dream come true :D

Now if only this would happen for the dreams where I'm Superman...

~Bridey J