The Stiff: Chapter 3: Page 93
I had a dream last night that I was reading this Dr. Seuss book and I discovered it had a reference to Palestine. It actually had the word “Palestinians” full on next to some Dr. Seuss sad-sack furry-handed figures who were undergoing some suffering. Obviously this blew my mind, but then I woke up.
NEXT UPDATE: Wednesday!
“Obviously this blew my mind, but then I woke up.” — story of my life, except now and then my mind is blown when I wake up to find that what I had dreamt made sense. Lately I’ve been dreaming with written language (you know, that thing that shouldn’t work in dreams…) and I wake up to find that, to my surprise, it wasn’t garbage. One day I dreamed I was in a small classroom with a small blackboard with space travel diagrams and planet orbits drawn all over it, which I analyzed and made a discovery — which, obviously, I tried to write on the board.
I erased the drawings with ease, but I had some difficulty writing (understandable, considering it should be impossible), except I managed to concentrate and succeeded — partially. Halfway through I woke up, unsure of how exactly the phrase ended. Still, I was able to reconstruct it to a degree of certainty, and it turned out to be Latin. “Ex lux ad cardo”, which Google translated as “The light is at stake”. Which surprisingly enough made sense in the context as well.
I guess those dreams are what happens when you spend too much time reading and watching movies/TV series. In that case it probably was a sci-fi overdose, albeit an intriguing one. I swear I didn’t know enough Latin to come up with that consciously.
Same thing happened yesterday when I dreamed of a fantasy/sci-fi TV show I was sure existed while I was sleep, called Dyadjang. I woke up thinking “I liked that, I should Google more about it”, but I got zero hits (what word has no hits on Google!?). After some tinkering, I realized it was actually two words — “dyad” and “jang”, which was another way to write “yang”. Which, again, totally made sense as that TV show’s title. And, again, I swear I had no idea “dyad” was even a word (although the yang part was obvious).
So, who knows, maybe there’s more to your dreams as well. Sometimes it only takes a little extra curiosity and research. I only wish I remembered my dreams better, some of them were excellent scripts (including that latest TV show). Hopefully one day I’ll gather enough parts to make a whole.
I read once that dreams are stored in a different part of the memory than ‘real’ memories, which is why they tend to be forgotten so easily upon rising. And which, I guess, is why you’re supposed to keep a dream journal next to your bed to record your dreams when you wake up, before you forget. Then the ‘real’ memory of writing about it becomes overlaid on the memory of the dream, and it becomes “real”. I’ve had the opposite, though, when I *think* something really happened but then no one else remembers it happening, so I am reluctantly (somewhat horrifically sometimes in fact) forced to conclude it had only been a dream! ;)
What I rarely dream about, but wish I did more often, is the kind of dream fantasy-narratives that make up (fictional) dream-narratives like H.P. Lovecraft & Lord Dunsany’s stories. Apparently Lovecraft really did have some dreams like this, but I suppose those stories don’t really capture the true experience of dreams at all, sadly. Although I recall having more dreams like that when I was younger: dreams where I was actually in some fantastic space having fantastic experiences, rather than dreams that are more like surreally modified extrusions of everyday life & everyday events. (Or dreams of the past, or some modified version of the past: “I’m still living in San Francisco like I used to,” etc.) Also, as I get older, I find that I have dreams where I’m not actually *experiencing* the dream, but I’m watching a movie or reading a book *about* the dream. Possibly a sad statement that so much of my life has involved absorbing media, I now dream about this, rather than about actual firsthand experiences. :/