dreams

Prisoners

I'm sorry to have been neglecting this journal.  It is not that I haven't been dreaming, but I haven't been able to recall my dreams.  Recently when I wake I start attending to situations in my waking life, and by the time I remember to try to remember my dreams they have faded.  Last night however, I woke a couple of times from fairly vivid dreams and I remember snatches:

An important woman has two men as prisoners.  She knows that one of them is an important powerful man and the other is not, but she is not sure which is which.  Both men are dark haired and about 6 feet tall.  The apparent important one is older, maybe 40, with a sturdier frame a squarish head and blunt features, while the other is thinner with sharper features and moves more lightly on his feet.  Both men are dissembling, for different reasons, throwing out hints of behavior that might indicate that they have reversed roles.  The woman sees all this, but still hasn't made up her mind about them.

In another dream I am at a service garage in back of a mall.  who ever I am with and I have gotten here in beat up old taxi cab which we had stolen for the purpose, but we now abandon among the  cars in the mall lot, many of which are also beat up old taxis.  Inside the garage some one is trying to get a partially disassembled big yellow bucket loader onto the back of a truck or trailer.

Later, I am approaching a small town across a grassy plain.  There are groups of people standing in rough lines listening to someone talk.  I gather it is some kind of youth award presentation, but I pass by and continue toward the town, which is really just one building an old two story white painted concrete building, open on the ground floor.  Inside a couple of grizzled old men wearing military uniforms under cheap coveralls are rummaging in their lockers.  I move ahead with trepidation toward the  counter, where I will learn my fate...

Benches

One of the things I find fascinating about dreams is how much great detail I see in some item while some events are vague and unformed.

Last night I dreamed about a couple of outdoor benches.  They were old fashioned park bench style with black enamel cast iron frames and varnished blond wood slats - probably oak.  ML and I took one to a lady who, with her husband, specialized in refurbishing these kinds of things.  She wanted a lot of money to do the work.  I didn't care about the money for itself but I was concerned about being overcharged.  She had me sign several checks in advance.  There were three or four of them in specific amounts between 1500 and 2500.  I remember one in particular was for 2248.  I assumed these were dollars.  The checks themselves were pink with darker red printing, mad out in blue ink.

I told the lady that these benches would be easier to do than she thought, but in looking at them more closely I noticed that some of the iron frames that held the slats in place between the legs were missing and would have to be replaced with wood.  I was wondering whether they replacement pieces could be steam bent or would need to be laminated, or whether they could just be thin pieces of wood bent ant held by the slats.

In passing, I noticed that the some of fasteners that held the bench together had unusual heads - they were Philips headed, but instead of the usual crossed slots on the axis of the screw, there were two crossed slots off set from the axis.  I remember thinking that this seemed a good idea since if one cross got buggered up the other one would still work.  I was wondering if all the torque applied to the screwdriver would get transmitted to the crew since the slots were off axis.

This observation only took up a very small percentage of the apparent time in the dream and didn't seem particularly an important part, but the detail of the screws was extremely vivid.  I find it curious, the differences in detail focus from one part of the dream to another.  I suppose in waking life we have these differences in focus all the time that go un-noted.  This is probably because in waking life we have more definite priorities that guide our attention, whereas in dreams we are much more passive observers and a wide range of experiences have more or less  the same emotional weight. 

Albright

The last couple of nights have been very quiet on the dream front.  Either I haven't been dreaming much or the dreams have been so shallow I can't remember them by the time I'm awake enough to remember to remember.  I don't know whether it's the phase of the moon (new) or what.  A couple of fragments:  Night before last I was looking for something in the unruly pile of papers on my desk.  Last night I remember there were a pair of twins named Albright, each sailing their own single-handed yacht in support of a different cause.

Last evening (while awake), a group of us got to talking about dreams.  JB said that his most vivid dream memory was of a dream about dreaming.  In this dream it was revealed to him why we dream.  He seems to have accepted the dreams explanation as the truth.  Unfortunately, his explanation to the group wasn't articulate enough to persuade me, at least, that his was a true revelation.  I'm sure his vision in the dream was clear, but conveying these visions in words with the same force they have in the dream is no trivial task. 

The explanation for dreams that was revealed to him was that dreams are caused by some active part of the brain sending out random bursts of signals to prepare surrounding parts of the brain that are inactive to start doing processing.  At least that's what I understood him to say.  But the gist of what he was saying, and I thought he believed it, was that most dreams are random and that we shouldn't try to read too much into them.   Then, however, we started to talk about nightmares.  His wife described a recurrent nightmare she had had as a child whenever she was sick.

If I had to give an objective explanation for dreams, mine would probably not be that different from JB's.  I believe that dreams are our experience of the brain strengthening its associative connections.  As I understand it, there have been studies of sleep that show that REM sleep is important to learning, and that people awoken from REM sleep are much more likely to report having been dreaming.

Still, one thing I am coming to feel, at least partially as a result of keeping this blog, is that dreams are a mysterious and wonderful gift of experience.  When they are vivid, they seem every bit as real as waking life.  To ignore them, to write them off as unimportant - as just random - is I think to waste a wonderful part of life in this world.

Again, nothing to report

Another quiet night.  I know I dreamt, but what it was I can't say - gone by the time I was awake enough to remember to remember.

A Quiet Night

One of the things I have learned from keeping this dream journal is that I dream much more than I had previously realized.  Even those nights, like last night, after which I can't hold on to my dreams, I know I have dreamed about something.  And on those nights I can hang on to a few images, I am quite sure I have dreamed much, much more than i retain long enough to scribble down.

Nada

No memory of even the slightest dream last night.  I made do with about 5 hours on pillow time, but I don't think that had anything to do with it.  All flown from my head by the time I opened my eyes...

T. Mike dreams

Mike's Franklin Pierce Dream.  I like his commentary as much as the dream.  Probably, I should add a little commentary to my posts.  Usually, I am pretty confused about what, if anything, my dreams mean, but I do often see an echo of the previous day's events...

Anthony's Dream

Anthony's Dream

Hadji's Dream

Occasionally I will link to other dream reports.  Here's one:  Hadji's Dream.  I like the feeling in this dream, but I found the conversation with Tom at the end a little too coherent for a dream.  What do you think?

seafever dreams

Ms Feverish has a great post on rising up from the dream state, where the recent dream and the real world are entangled and each carry the same weight.