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I’ve been having strange dreams the last couple of days. I’m not sure if it’s related to what I’ve been filling my head with, reading and television, or if it’s a sudden creative burst my brain’s having because I’m not having one away from my dreams. Either way, the intensity of my dreams has stepped up dramatically.
One of them in particular involved a person I haven’t seen since 2000, or maybe before. My ex-wife’s mother, to be precise. That dream was a rolling landscape of vivid imagery, football games, Pentecostal preachers giving seminars on expulsion of demons, and evil actors I would have to oppose through the convenience of being in a movie with them.
I’m not much for interpreting dreams, but one I had a few days ago had such creepy overtones I’m going to write it up as a short story and try to find some place to submit it. It was frightening in its images, in its ending, in its shortness and in my inability to shed it from memory or distance myself from the horror emotions it invoked within. Good stuff.
Look for that on my fiction blog pretty soon.
Anyway, dreams are strange things, aren’t they? Sometimes they seem to be messages. My wife dreamed about someone trying to break into a friend’s house as I was reading the blog post that friend wrote saying someone tried to break into her house. Freaky.
Are dreams simply our brains doing things to keep our conscious minds from going insane, processing chemicals and firing neurons in the process? Or can they be visions, a method of “piercing the veil” and giving us glimpses of things beyond our ordinary limits? We’ve all had dreams in which we do something which seems mundane and ordinary, only to find at a later time we are actually doing those things and it sparks a moment of déjà vu, and we stop dead in our tracks with racing heart and bulging eyes and let anyone around us know we’ve dreamed this.
Science has tried to explain those instances away, saying usually those things take place when we dream so generically we could be anywhere, doing anything, and ordinary events cause the trigger. Or we dream of something we do routinely, on a regular basis in our everyday lives, and the trigger of remembering those dreams makes it seem like déjà vu, when in fact, it’s something we’ve done so many times there’s nothing unusual about it.
But those explanations break down in cases like my wife’s dream. She dreamed about a nameless, faceless friend and only identified who it was when she saw, in the dream, a distinctive characteristic of the friend. She was dreaming the sequence at the same time I read it. When I saw her eyes flutter open I told her about the blog post. She told me about the dream. That’s strange, isn’t it? Or is it coincidence?
What are dreams? Will we ever understand them? Can we ever understand them?
Sound off; tell me what you think.
-JDT-
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