Dreams

There's an interesting article on dreams in this week's Science Times. I've always been fascinated by this subject because for one, it's an interesting phenomenon in itself (is it really just evolutionary spandrel or did it evolve of its own accord? What are it's (dis)advantages? How does it happen? Well, definitely, in order to know more about dreaming, we have to know more about consciousness and memory), and also because I have a better ability than most to recall my dreams, and/or I have more vivid dreams in general, and so I guess I dwell on them more (Even though Dumbledore says "it does not do to dwell on dreams." Of course, he was talking about a different sort of dreaming...).

Upon waking up after a vivid dream, I almost always try to figure out why I dreamed about this happening, and why this person popped up in my dream because it's my firm belief that there's a logical explanation for each event/person involved, at least in my case. I don't not believe in prophetic dreams (especially after hearing Jin's stories), but I know I'm no psychic, nor am I magically connected to a certain Dark Wizard, and I definitely don't believe in all that Freudian nonsense about daughters wanting their fathers and whatnot.

What I've learned from analyzing my own dreams is that the basic process is: my mind takes a kernel of reality (whether it is a particularly intense emotion, eg: desire or guilt, or a person that I thought of in passing the day before- the kernel is almost always taken from the reality of the day before- and promptly forgot about) and projects it into a full-blown movie using characters/events/places/feelings from my past experiences and thoughts, that I suppose get all jumbled up in my brain as it relaxes into sleep-mode. It's like a kernel of reality getting tossed into a box of old photos, my memory file, and shaken up like a Wendy's salad. Of course, this describes the process of only one kind of dream. I have others that stay more in the current, like when I used to work at the bookstore full-time, once, I dreamed that I came down the escalator with a pile of books in my arms to find three of my co-workers at the info-desk trying to juggle pencils on their noses. Wait, was that a dream? Hm...

So, anyway, in this sense, dreams are like myths; they are "truth-bearing tales," always containing a kernel of truth dressed up in nonsense from your jumbled memory.

Some observations about my dreams:

Whenever I make a big move, I constantly dream about the people I leave behind for at least the first couple weeks. Also, childhood friends crop up in my dreams more often than usual. This time around, I haven't even moved yet (about 2 months to go), but those dreams have already begun.

Eating a lot of food right before falling asleep gives me ultra-vivid, action-packed dreams. Garfield had it right: "No more pizza after midnight!" (But the cause can't be a surplus of glucose in the brain because the food hasn't been processed yet...something about your digestive system being seriously active? I dunno...)

Some people are more prone to flying dreams than others. I'm in the latter category.

In high school, I experimented with this deep-breathing technique right before falling asleep, and all my dreams were extremely serene and happy. Like I would dream about stretching on a sandy beach, blue skies, ocean, gulls in the distance, the works.

A lot of aspects about dreams and dreaming (like, why I dream about the people I left behind) is pretty easily explained- elementary, my dear Watson- but on the whole, the phenomenon is still shrouded in mystery because it delves into the field of consciousness and memory, which we really don't know much about yet, though that's slowly changing.