Following on from back in the day…

Jeremy asked: What do you dream about? Daydreams, night dreams, anxiety dreams, whatever. Do you ever end up dreaming about work?

I heard somewhere, and I think it’s a fairly well accepted theory, as much as theories about dreaming can be, that the dream state is when the archivist in your brain comes it and shuffles everything around, cross referencing all your experiences and putting them in order. In the same way that resting allows your muscles to rebuild, you knowledge base, both rational and emotional, uses this time to get organized so it’s more useful. I like this idea, not just because it’s a cute metaphor but because it goes some way to explaining why my dreams are so realistic.

I don’t mean realistic as in “I was flying over an alien mountain range with dolphins and it was so realistic“. I mean realistic as in really quite normal, so normal I often confuse my dreams with reality.

A favourite story was back in the old fanzine days, circa 1995. I’d been doing a night shift job for a couple of months and had gotten into the habit of checking my mail before going to bed. Rol had sent a copy of his self published comic, The Jock, to which I usually wrote a letter which usually got published. I read said comic and went to bed. A month later the next issues came though and I was mildly pissed off that he hadn’t printed my letter until I realised I’d dreamt it and had believed my dream ever since. And that’s one of the more interesting ones.

I’ve stopped reading novels in bed because if I fall asleep I tend to dream the rest of the story in such a plausible way I can’t find my place again because I can’t find that bit which wasn’t there to begin with.

I frequently dream about people I know, but people I know shouldn’t get weirded out about that because it’s all quite innocuous. I’ll dream about us going to the pub or talking about something innocuous. This again can get confusing later on when I think back to things we’ve talked about, which might explain why I have a terrible memory of conversations I’ve had. To avoid embarrassment I just blank them all out, real or made up by my subconscious.

The dreams tend to be quite short term, so if I’ve met you a few times in the last week the chances are you’ll crop up in a dream but if I haven’t seen you for a few months you won’t. With my current somewhat restricted social life this means that with a few notable exceptions I tend to have quite dull people in my dreams – fellow temps, managers.

I very rarely, if ever, dream about fictional characters. When I was watching whole seasons of Buffy in one sitting characters from that might have popped up, but not in the sense that people usually dream about Buffy, I’m sorry to say.

One difference which does help me tell the difference is that in my dreams I’m always trying to catch up. Events and people are always moving on at a pace I can’t keep up with. This is probably some anxiety thing and nothing to worry about, but it’s rather odd and does make my dreams run at a slightly faster pace than reality, although given how slowly my reality runs right now that isn’t too hard.

Specific details about dreams I can never remember. On the rare occasion that I do have a really interesting dream it’ll fade a few minutes after I wake up.

As I was typing this Sam came downstairs and asked what I was writing about. She’s one of those people who has really fucking odd dreams about quite disturbing things which, at least amongst people I know, seems to be the norm. I’m not sure if I’m jealous or not.

Are boring dreams a bad thing? In some ways it’d be nice to have a really wild subconscious life but at the same time sleep is when I rest and escape from the madness of the real world. When I’m feeling depressed or anxious or scared my immediate solution is to go to bed and sleep for as long as possible because there it all makes sense. I’ll leave the freaky oddness to the real world.

More questions please – I think ones about me, rather that asking what I think about something, are the best. I’m in an autobiographical mood, god help me…