There are those who swear that in the morning, when they wake up, they remember everything about their dreams. They claim to remember every moment, every word, every comment from their slumber.
Me… all I can remember is maybe a word, a phrase, a note, a number. And no earthly reason why I would even remember that.
When I was younger, I used to keep a notepad and a pen near my bed. If I woke up from a dream, I would quickly write down anything I remembered from that dream – anything. Words. Phrases. Colors. Concepts. Sounds. Music.
But all I could transcribe from brain to paper were a few words. A fragment.
Some people have very vivid dreams, sometimes they are almost to the point of full-fledged nightmares. No, I’m not talking about the ones where they wake up and there’s a streak of razor-cuts across their chest and some guy in a striped turtleneck, with a bad facial skin condition, is hovering near their bed. I’m talking about people who talk in their sleep, who have whole conversations in their sleep – and when you wake them up, they don’t remember a thing. Wow.
They don’t remember a thing. Do you realize that if that were the case, you could dream about spending the night with Olivia Wilde and wake up in the morning and never remember the dream? That’s cruel!
There’s dreams – and then there’s the approach of dreams. The drifting off to Slumberland. That moment when Sheep #83 just leaped over the fence and you can’t count any higher. When does that moment hit? When do we sense our alertness drifting into somnambulism?
It is said that we might have as many as five different dreams in a night. And still, we only remember a single fragment. But that fragment itself could be the final piece to a long-lost puzzle.
It is said that a songwriter once had an unfinished song – he needed one more hook to complete it. Nothing. He had nothing. And then, one night, in his dreams, he remembered something. And that one fragment became the refrain to the song. Something about never counting your money when you’re sitting at the table, there’ll be time enough for counting when the dealing’s done. Yep. You know the song. Now it’s stuck in your head. You can thank me later.
I know people who drift off to sleep with the aid of a radio or the television. Some people take a pill to achieve rest. Others meditate. And eventually, the dreams occur. But will they remember them as their own independent autonomous stories, or will they be influenced by the newscast or a radio talk show?
Sometimes I would remember feeling like there was something in my dream that I couldn’t control. Something like a sound, like voices talking about some sporting event. But I didn’t want them to talk about a sporting event. And then, one eye open, I realize that my clock radio has been blasting Mike and Mike in the Morning for the past ten minutes, and Greenberg and Golic have been corrupting my nocturnal commissions. Eww…
There’s a claim that dreams themselves can be a code to your subconscious. For example, one could interpret a dream about a cigar as something overtly sexual or erotic. Others might consider a dream about a cigar as an observance of mortality, as people have died from smoking tobacco products. Or, as Dan Aykroyd once said in an episode of Saturday Night Live, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
I’ve blogged about dreams in the past – sometimes they’ve been daydreams, sometimes they’ve been influenced by anesthetics or from illness. Sometimes the dreams are fantasy. Sometimes the dreams are horrific. Sometimes we imagine ourselves with long-lost friends or distant relatives. We could be talking about life, the universe and everything for exactly 42 minutes… and when we wake up, we barely remember that we said something about something to someone. And that’s it.
Maybe we should all write down those fragments of dreams when we wake up. And perhaps, over time, those fragments, like a thousand jigsaw puzzle pieces from a thousand different jigsaw puzzles, will eventually bond into a cohesive and striking abstract.
So let’s try this. Tonight, before you go to sleep, get a pencil and paper and leave it by your nightstand. When you wake up in the morning… write down as much of the dream as you remember. Do this for about a week. And then, at the end of the week, look over those morning notes that you have made.
What you have written down may, in fact, be more than just random fragments. If so… wouldn’t that be amazing?