I often wonder if dreams are where our memories, ideas, and other thoughts go to play once we melt into our beds.
I had an amazing dream Saturday night, so amazing that I hopped out of bed and typed down my thoughts like a madman lest I forget something.
I’m not going to bore anyone with the full details of my dream; it wasn’t some bizarre landscape inspired by Salvador Dali or scenes pulled out of Twin Peaks.
In fact, what surprised me most about my dream was how coherent it was, how positively ordinary it turned out to be. It reminded me of the movie Inception.
For the uninitiated, Inception is about highly trained professionals who can travel into another person’s dream and extract (or implant) information. It’s basically dream espionage.
The concept of a lucid dream is very important to understanding the movie. I’m sure everyone’s had a lucid dream at one point: it’s a dream in which you know you’re dreaming.
I’ve had lucid dreams in the past, but Saturday night’s dream was on a whole different level.
You know how people claim that a dream feels “so real!” You’ve probably uttered it yourself at one point when describing your dream to a friend: “That gnome riding a unicycle across the Grand Canyon looked so real! The wind on my face felt so real!”
Before Saturday I slung those phrases around too, but looking back on those dreams now, I realize they were still covered by the “fuzz” of the dream world.
You know what I mean, right? It’s like a screen of lint, a membrane of some sort that’s draped over your senses in a dream. It doesn’t have the clarity of the world as you read my blog or scroll with your mouse or listen to your boss in the background.
Yet my dream on Saturday did.
And it fascinates me.
In the dream, I looked down at my hands and could make them out perfectly, every ridge and nail and wrinkle.
I knew I was dreaming and willed myself to remain inside, asleep, so that I could listen and see and touch. I was in a car and could make out the bumpy texture of the leather dashboard.
Time wasn’t elastic: I wasn’t in one place one second and miles away the next. Time was linear and tangible.
I could simultaneously feel my body under the sheets in the real world and within the car in the dream world. And it was the dream world that was sharper and clearer.
Again, very oddly, I refused to rouse myself from sleep. I wanted to explore the feeling or consciousness in both worlds.
Ok, that’s enough of that. I’d love to hear your thoughts on dreams.
Have you ever had an especially potent dream? What do you think dreams are or believe they signify?
Mike_Reverb 