| | In which footnotes feature prominently
The night before last I had a funny dream, and yesterday I told people
about it. Then last night I had another funny dream. I woke
up, spent an hour telling maybe ten different people about all the
parts they had played in my dream...and then I woke up for real.
So I had a dream within a dream, which has never happened to me before.
It was trippy, to say the least. It's a recursive dream*, or something like a frame story--the Canterbury Tales
of dreams. It was about six in the morning when I woke up for
real, and I spent the next fifteen minutes hurriedly scribbling down
all the details so I wouldn't forget them. I keep a notebook and
pen next to my bed for this exact purpose.
I love dreams, and I consider myself lucky that I remember mine almost
every morning; most of them are spectacular. When it comes to
remembering them over weeks or months or years, I seem to store
memories of dreams in a particular part of my brain, separate from my
"real" long-term memory. Either that, or my dream memories all
have a special "tag" on them that links them together incredibly
strongly.
I know this because although I can't often recall dreams from more than
a day ago, when I do remember one, several other, semi-related old dreams
come streaming back in rapid succession. I find that if I
concentrate on remembering one dream, all of a sudden I'll be
"transported" into a completely different dream, and then another, and
then another, often through thirty or forty or fifty different
dreams. Sometimes I'll hit on one that I *know* I haven't been
able to recall since the morning after I dreamed it, even though that
may have been years ago.
The links are usually between dreams that occur in the same (fictional)
location**, or in similar-looking places (on a plane***, in a forest,
in a village on a hill). Oddly enough, when the action occurs in
a place that exists in the real world (my high school, my backyard), it
never triggers a *real* memory of something that happened there--it
only works for dreams.
Needless to say, bedtime is usually my favorite time of day. I
feel sorry for people who don't remember their dreams--I know my life
would be much duller without mine. By the way, does anyone know
what I'm talking about? Do you remember dreams this way, too?
* Does this mean that tonight
I'll have a dream in which I have a dream, wake up and tell people
about it, then wake up again and blog about it? I hope so.
** There are several elaborate "dreamscapes" where several of my dreams
have taken place. I usually recognize them while I'm actually in
the dream, though when I'm asleep they register as real places that
I've visited before.
*** Probably a quarter to a third of my dreams take place on
airplanes. Every now and then I'll be on a spaceship, but it's
usually planes, planes, planes. I don't know why.
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| | Posted 8/27/2005 8:24 PM - 99 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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