Friday, April 3, 2009

How a crazy person sleeps

One of the perks of sleeping more soundly, other than not walking around with my left eye twitching constantly, is that I seem to be dreaming again. I have always been one of those people who have really vivid dreams. I can still remember a few of them from years back.

The other day I woke up in the middle of a weird dream. There was a person in it, a guy, who I don't know, who followed me along a path to a cabin or some kind of little house. I ran inside the house and closed the door. It might have been creepy, but I wasn't afraid of him and in the dream I was aware that I was being dramatic by running from him. He was coming up to the door shouting something just as I woke up. I can clearly picture his face, but I have no idea who he was or what he wanted from me or why I slammed the door in his face.

Last night I dreamt about my first boss. I was trying to return some copy paper that I had stolen from the office before he realized it was gone. Someone else I used to work with, but at a different job, was helping me sneak in to the office at night and return the large load of stolen paper, some of which we hid in the ceiling tiles.

I don't expect the dreams to make sense, but sometimes I can pick up a thread of a real life awake conversation or a person I was thinking of and the dreams seem to have at least some valid relationship with my brain. Other times the dreams seem to have no connection whatsoever. And then I wonder who the dream strangers are, the ones like the cabin guy.

Are they faces from my subconscious, people I have passed on the street or seen in movies? Are they real people or completely made up? Are they people I have known in some other level of consciousness? Is there a whole other existence that I am tapping into? A past life? Or is my imagination just that powerful? Even if the strange dream people are really things or thoughts or issues, how does my brain construct a physical representation of that?

It drives me crazy because my dreams seem so close to reality, like one day I will open my front door and there will be the cabin guy and he'll be all Why did you slam the door in my face?

And I'll know exactly why.

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