dreams …

dreams …

i am fascinated by dreams … mostly by the concept, and how it relates to what we experience as reality when waking.  i loved the matrix when it came out, one of my favorite movies of all time.  inception is my favorite movie of all time; i went to see it twice in the theater, something i had never done before.  i have experienced dreams within dreams, lucid dreams.

dream interpretation also fascinates me, mostly because i think most of it isn’t very accurate.  i watched a PBS series on dreaming for a while, and the only thing that seemed clear was that dreams are often a conduit of creative thinking while sleeping, and that people tend to have more dreams filled with anxiety during certain sleep cycles.  beyond that, there were only just a lot of questions.  frankly, inception seemed to hit upon as many shared truths as any other source:  mostly, we don’t realize we’re dreaming, but sometimes we do.  often, we can never trace how we got to a particular place (and this is most often how i’ve come to the conclusion that i’m dreaming:  i’m in some place that makes so little sense, i figure i have to be in a dream).  i have previously experienced that i immediately wake up upon dying in a dream.  in lucid dreams, i can seem to control to some degree who appears in them and whether i can fly or whatever.

there are certainly individual dreams that i have had that have gotten me thinking.  there were themes in dreams that i thankfully rarely experience anymore.  the worst was dreaming i had come to the end of a semester and a final i needed to take for a class i  never really even remembered i had signed up for it, and thus hadn’t been attending it all semester, and felt wholly unprepared.  i had lots of dreams after getting divorced about what exactly happened to lead to that.  dreams about trying to run and feeling like i was in slow motion.  dreams about being with a particular person.  dreams about flying.  my dreams these days seem very situational, and it is rare that i don’t wake up knowing exactly why i was having a particular dream.  there are dreams i have had that i will remember forever, as much so as waking moments in my life.

it’s interesting to me that animals appear to dream, and to watch cats & dogs when they appear to be dreaming.  we have one cat that dreams and makes the same noises in sleep that she makes when she is “talking” to the birds out on the deck.  they are fun to watch when they appear to be running or fighting in their dreams.  perhaps answering the question “why do cats dream?”  can help answer the question “why do we dream?”

i also talk of dreams with amy in the sense of what do we want to do in our heart of hearts. we dream of living a life of productivity and meaning, learning and interaction.  i’m not even sure how much of our dream amy would want me to share, so i won’t.  but the interesting thing is … we don’t actually dream of this stuff during our non-waking hours (or perhaps i should only speak for myself, but i don’t think amy does, either).  these are merely things that we deeply hope happen, conditions about our future that we hope we can make come true.  is the way we all talk of our dreams of the future in this way an insight into what dreams really are?  for the most part, i don’t think this is the case.

and, no … this is not all prelude to some interesting dream i wish to share.  most days, i wake up with a sense that i had been dreaming, but don’t remember the dream upon waking.  amy shares her dreams upon waking with me fairly regularly.  but even when i remember dreams, they seem usually too personal to share.

sorry.