Ladies and gentlmen, I welcome you to Insights in which I try to throw a little of my own perspective light onto topics with which people mail me. No subject is too off-the-wall or taboo; I'll stick my neck out on anything.
Naomi actually brought this topic up to me many months ago along with her first topic on Women. However, I wanted to be fair and have everyone else get there shot in at getting my opinions (since I rarely offer them up unless asked). Now that things have really slown down, I'll hit this one.
First of all, I'll say I'm pleased to have more to work with on this one. It's actually a question instead of a general topic. If it were just 'Dreams', I'd say, yeah, I'm for dreams. They kick ass. GO DREAMS!!! But now asking what I think dreams are and where they come from...now we'll see what my Insights are onto it.
First off, screw Freud. Every dream I have does not relate to sex. Trust me, I know the ones that relate to sex. I enjoy those quite a bit. But simply because I dream that I can move at super-speeds or can fly or can kick ass in hand-to-hand combat does not mean that I want to get laid really badly. No, I just really have a desire to be a super-hero. Sue me, okay.
Here are some little known facts about dreaming: First of all, most people only dream with one side of their brain. Because of this, a majority of people can't read in their dreams. It's true. I was actually like that for years and somehow or another, I got both sides to join in on it. But for the most part, reading in your dreams is an impossibility. Secondly, as opposed to common thought, if you die in your dreams, you do not die in real life. If you dream you're falling and you hit the ground, what's going to happen in real life? You fall of the bed three feet and hit the ground. And unless you keep knives embedded in your floor pointed up, that ain't killing you. Are you drowning in your dream? You won't suffocate in real life. It's a physical impossibility to hold your own breath until you die. You pass out and breathe again. Sorry, no death for you. You get shot in your dream? Needless to say, unless you're telekinetic and controlling the gun with your mind, nothing's going on. So why do we usually wake up before we die? Same reason we wake up from nightmares. We spook ourselves awake.
But Charlie, how could I do that? Ummm, beats the hell out of me. I know I've been doing it for years. A lot of people don't know this about me, but when I was young (about 4), I used to have horrible, horrible nightmares. I mean, I would run around the house (asleep), screaming in terror, and it was impossible to wake me up from them. So growing older, I just naturally learned how to wake myself up whenever I felt the need to. I avoided many nasties in my dreams after that. Seriously? I haven't had a true nightmare in over a dozen years now. I simply won't let it happen.
Another interesting point: Lucid dreaming. Ever heard of it? Few know the name, but they've experienced it. It's when you're dreaming and you KNOW you're dreaming. Most people wake up when they realize it. Some (myself included, occasionally) can take that knowledge in their dream and take control of their 'universe' and do whatever they want with it. Wanna fly, go ahead. Wanna be on the beach, sure thing. Wanna have three beautiful girls giving you a massage, hey, it's your dream (okay, it's my dream, but still...). Best way to go about lucid dreaming is this: throughout the day, ask yourself, "Could this be a dream?" Look at certain things, look away, then look back to see if it's unchanged. If you make it a habit, you'll end up doing it in your dreams and catching on to when you're dreaming. There's several other neat tricks, and if you ask me nicely, I might tell you.
Most people will accept the fact that dreaming is the unconscious part of the mind doing the work. But did you realize that your senses are strengthened during this time? Ever wake up one minute before your alarm went off? Or fell asleep with your glasses on but you never turned in your sleep to make them bend, break, or fall off? Or a simpler one, when's the last time you've fallen off your bed in your sleep? Even a couch you sleep on. You can sense where the edges are and you'll maneuver in your sleep to avoid falling. While asleep, your mental thoughts of time are hundreds more times as sensitive. That's why during the day you have to keep checking your watch to see how much time has passed, but at night, you can wake up at the exact minute your alarm was supposed to go off....if it weren't a weekend, etc. But we're not to the coolest part yet.
NOW, we're getting to Naomi's question, 'What are dreams?' In my opinion, dreams are like the U.S.A., it's a whole lot of everything thrown into one. It's the past: memories that you're drudging up, your old schooldays, lost loves, etc. It's the present: things that have occurred to you that day that are floating around still. It's the future: bits and pieces of your destiny.....wait a minute. Your future? I'm full of shit, aren't I? Think about it. That's where most deja vu comes from. "I had a dream about something like this happening, once." Sound familiar? You want more proof that our lives are pretty much laid out for you, there it is. Deja vu is mostly when the previews we've seen in our dreams come to the theatre near you. But I'll touch up on that more later. Dreams are also our fantasies: our wants, our goals, our little secrets that haunt us.
So you want an analogy? Dreams are like jigsaw puzzles where the box has 100,000 pieces in it, all the pieces are the same shape, only 1,000 pieces are used, and there's nothing on the front of the box to show you what it's supposed to look like. Pretty screwed up, huh? Yeah, well, so are our dreams, if you think about it. So one last thing to REALLY leave you thinking (which is usually my goal):
If our dreams can show us the future, why do we feel that 'deja vu' so rarely? Here's my answer, and it's scary. Our brains are capable of so much. It's more powerful than all the computers of the world united. I think our brains are constantly scanning the plausible futures we may have. It goes through the infinite spanses of probabilities and parallel worlds, and it shows us several dozen a night (yes, you may only remember one dream, but you've had a minimum of half a dozen). Naturally, only a few of those will come to pass. Then again, I could be full of it, but those are my Insights.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to lay down for a nap. It's time for my massage.
(Author's Note: after going to bed after writing all this, I managed to have a dream(s) combining every aspect I mentioned before. The gist of the dream: Me, Joe, and Kate [present] were out driving around trying to find my first girlfriend, Sammantha Wessel [past]. The slight change was the Joe and I were in full Supercool gear [fantasy]. When we find her, she obviously doesn't recognize me as I'm in Negative Zone form so I drop the form and we talk and get reacquantied. However, she's in trouble as her husband's house in falling down, so we offer to help. At one point, I give Joe the NegaBands so he can fly too. When it doesn't seem to work, I tell him it's a dream and explain to him how to fly [lucid dreaming]. In any case, at the end of the dream, I don't get the girl as I wake up at 4:30 [sensed my normal wake-up time for work while asleep with no alarm]. As for the future part? Obviously it's hard to say what part of the dream it could have been.)
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