Tag: dreams

Now that Zachary is sleeping through the night, I am finally getting more than 3 hours of sleep at a time.  This means that for the first time in nearly 8 months, I’ve started dreaming again.  Boy, have I ever!  It’s as if eight months of nightly dreams were packed in my brain under extremely high pressure and now that there’s an opening, they are blowing through it.  I’m having dozens of dreams a night, most of which I don’t remember.  To be honest, it’s rather exhausting.  I don’t know how Scott Edelman does it.

There is one recent dream which I do recall at least parts of:  I was talking with Stephen King.  We were at his house and talking about writing.   On a small desk off to the side of his office (which in my dream was very art deco) was an old, old typewriter.  I went to look at it and he warned me not to touch it because it was very old.  I told him that I, too, have an old typewriter (mine is a Royal Quiet De Luxe much like this one.)  King then asked me if I’d built my typewriter.  No, I told him, I hadn’t.  It turns out he built his (though how it could be very old is only supported by dream logic).  And when I took a closer look, I saw that it was made entirely out of old Tyco model-train railroad track pieces.

I am enjoying these nights of uninterrupted sleep, but I must admit that I am looking forward to the pressure in my brain becoming equal with the world outside and the volume and pace of dreaming returning to normal.

Originally published at Jamie’s Blog. Please leave any comments there.

I had a bitterly sad dream last night. I’m sure I know the cause of it: I watched Randy Pausch’s “Time Management” lecture yesterday, and I’m certain that his circumstances contributed to the dream.

In the dream, the Norm half of vickyandnorm had been diagnosed with a terminal disease and in the strange, dream-like fashion in which time is compressed and altered, he knew that he had only one more day to live. The entire gang gathered at some place by the sea to say goodbye. strausmouse was there with rmstraus, kruppenheimer was there. Vicky was there, of course. I can’t remember if Andy was there or not. In general, everyone seemed happy and was trying to keep their spirits up, but I did so only through the greatest difficulty. I kept thinking of how Vicky must feel, and inevitably, it brought me to tears. I remember at one point hugging Lisa, she telling me that it was all going to be okay. But I couldn’t look at Norm. I would glance over at him when I thought he wasn’t looking and find him looking back at me, and then we’d both look away.

This scene went on for quite some time, with people joking, laughing, crying, talking. Finally, I summoned the courage to get up and say goodbye to Norm. His back was to me and he was talking to someone (Lisa, perhaps). I tapped him on the shoulder and when he turned around, I was stunned to find out that it was not Norm that was sick, but my brother, Doug. I don’t remember anything after that. I must have awakened from the dream. Still, it’s left me with a strange feeling all morning, and five or six hours later, I still haven’t been able to shake the feeling.

Eventually, I fell asleep last night. At some point, I had a rather remarkable dream. I was standing on some other planet (perhaps the moon, but I don’t think so). The Earth rose above the horizon casting a bluish light across the sky. It was close enough to make out the continents and oceans and clouds, and what’s more, I could see it rotating on it’s axis. I distinctly recall how bright and blue the oceans looks. It was spectacular.

Yeah, another weird dream last night (they come in waves, I suppose). This one I don’t remember too clearly, but I do remember I was hanging out with four people, all of whom decided to commit suicide by shooting themselves in the head. One of them did it first and was found slumped over a table that had something written on it. The words didn’t seem to make sense to me, but when the others saw it, they went outside and did the same thing.

Later, when I went back into the room where the first had died, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. Looking in the mirror, I realized the gibberish that she had written on the table was actually mirror-reversed words that read: “It’s a memory trick.”

For some reason, I think this dream was triggered by last night’s episode of Battlestar Galactica (did they use the phrase, “it’s a memory trick” in the episode? I can’t remember. Ironic, I know.) Even so, the dream was one I had early this morning and did not end up spoiling the pleasant spring night.

Last night I had a dream that my front left incisor came out. I understand that dreams about losing teeth are among the most common–more on that later. What was most interesting about the dream is that I was with some people–one of them may very well have been strausmouse. Holding my tooth, I remember being incredibly annoyed by the whole thing. I turned to strausmouse and said, “I’m incredibly annoyed by this whole thing. It would be convenient if this were a dream.”

“Dreams about losing teeth are among the most common,” strausmouse said.

I woke up from the dream, and in fact, I hadn’t lost my tooth. It was still there, but it was loose. I imagined I must have dreamed the dream-within-a-dream because of my loose tooth. Eventually, I woke up from the top-level dream and my front left incisor (and all my other teeth) were perfectly intact.

Knowing how herr doktor strausmouse is unable to resist any opportunity to flex his dream interpretation muscle, I decided to beat him to the bunch. I would, I figured, write an interpretation of my own dream, based on what I could find on the Internet.

I didn’t get very far because I kept laughing at how ridiculous the interpretations really were. One site encourages that you ask how you feel about the dream. It says that typically, this kind of dream produces a helplessness or a level of anxiety. At losing a tooth? I was annoyed, that’s how I felt. I was annoyed at losing a tooth. It seemed like a ridiculous thing to have happen.

It is also suggested that the dream might symbolize fear of failure or embarrassment. I rejected this offhand. I have received over 100 rejection slips and often write about the fact that I receive them. Fear of failure would prevent me from sending out another story. Embarrassment would prevent me from writing about it.

It could symbolize financial concerns (I have none out of the ordinary) or abandonment issues (none that I am aware of). Neither of these make any sense to me.

In fact, there is one interpretation that I can think of that fits the bill, and it’s the same as always: my brain processing short-term memories. The other day, after watching The Martian Child, I was explaining to Kelly about recursive science fiction. In response to that memory, my brain produced a recursive dream and the best it could come up with, was that I knew full well that people often dream about losing their teeth. Thus my dream-within-a-dream.

That satisfies me a whole lot more than the alternatives.

In an among the vast array of semi-medicated dreams I had last night, was the extremely rare “lucid” dream. A lucid dream occurs when the dreamer is aware that they are dreaming. It is not when the dreamer hopes that they are dreaming, as in a nightmare when you say to yourself, “I wish I were dreaming” (and it later turns out you were). Instead, it is the sudden realization that you are dreaming and you can take control of the the dream.

The lucid part last night came when I was in a bookstore or library of some kind. I caught the title of a book. I don’t remember what it was now, but in the dream, I specifically remember committing the title to memory. I once read somewhere that one way to tell you are dreaming is to read something, look away, and read it again. If the thing has changed, it’s an almost sure sign that you are dreaming. (Because of the way the mind work, things are not static in dreams, but change rapidly as different memories are triggered.) I remembered this as I passed by the book and decided to test it. I stopped, went back to the book, and looked at it again. Sure enough the title had changed and I immediately began to shout out that I was dreaming. I decided to run down a long corridor, shouting this over and over again, just to prove I was in control. After that, the dream must have ended because I don’t remember much.

Now here’s the most interesting part to me. While I was dreaming, I was certain beyond any doubt that I was in control of my actions. I decided to run down the corridor. I decided to shout out the mantra over and over again. It was as clear and obvious as my decision to go for pancakes this morning. And yet, when I woke up this morning and thought about the dream, it seemed to me that I hadn’t decided it at all. The free will I had in the dream was noting more than an illusion, created by the dream. The dream was still very much movie like, and while I was an “actor” in that movie, I was merely following a pre-defined script. It made me wonder if anyone actually had a lucid dream, or if lucid dreams are nothing more than a wishful concept that allows people to act out their fantasies, but is forever unattainable.