No witty title, no obscure musical references, just plain and simple. If there's one thing that's worse than sleeping, it's dreaming. I abhor losing 5-8 hours of my day, but then to be tormented by visions and apparitions - if that happened while you were awake you'd be in a psychiatric hospital. When they eventually invent a no-sleep pill that doesn't kill you, I'll be the first in the queue, in fact I'll camp outside the shop all night, ironically getting the worst night's sleep ever, just to remind me why I'm giving it up.
It's not nightmares, nightmares I can handle. Come at me with a werewolf (a common childhood nightmare of mine), I don't give a shit, I'm asleep. I'll just bust out the karate tekkers like I'm in the Matrix and they've planted the training in my head. I'll fight/run away from bad guys all night. It's fun, and it makes you thankful for waking up and it's kinda what dreaming is for. One theory is that, as well as being the brain shuffling information around, dreaming helps you learn and practise stuff you need to know, like how to take out werewolves.
The thing that really kills you is the good dreams. The ones where waking up is like being kicked out of heaven, the ones that make eternal slumber seem the highest prize of man's existence. It's been a while since I had one of those dreams that offer me all my desires on a plate, but they stick in my mind, reminding me what's just the other side of the veil of sleeping, calling me to close my eyes and forget the real world. To enter the world of dreams and never return. Now, if it were that simple, of course I'd be more than happy. This would be some sort of attainable heaven, to be able to live forever in your own dreams. But of course it is not that simple, we can not simply choose to reject the waking world and sleep. We could of course reject the living world, but that's a little risky, since we don't know what lies the other side of that particular veil.
The other dreams too, the ones that seem most surreal because of how normal most of it is. It's like watching a movie of your life but the screenplay writer got some essential details wrong. Your college mates are wandering round secondary school and your Uni friends are lounging around the staff room, for example. I never dreamed that, but that's the sort of thing.
The worst dream I've ever had came last night. It was a strange amalgam of the "good" dream type and the weird type. It presented to me, rather than my actual waking wants and ambitions, an alternative set of wants and ambitions, just as stupid and impossible as the ones I do have. It's almost like something was trying to tempt me. It did a fairly good job, to be honest and I've been messed up in the head all day. Well, that's my excuse for the poor footballing performance I turned in today anyway.
But I digress, the reason that a dream affected me so is because I spent a lot of time trying to work out why dream Dan suddenly had new plans for his limited time. It got me wondering if dreams can tell us anything about ourselves. Obviously there are all sorts of theories about dreams, ranging from the fairly sensible psychological to the quite frankly ridiculous psychic. But these theories largely take components of dreams and apply meaning to the presence of these components in your head. I wonder if the full narrative of a dream actually has anything to contribute to our understanding of ourselves.
I need to examine an example dream and see what I can find. Last night's good/weird offering should do the trick. I'm wondering how much of that to divulge though, it's fair embarrassing, to tell the truth, so I'll keep it vague. As most of you know, I'm in love. I've said it a lot and even if you haven't heard me say it or seen it written down on here, it's tattooed across my forehead just to make absolutely sure. Anyway, this has, as you can imagine, been the subject of those "good" dreams which present to me a world where my feelings are reciprocated and even a glimpse of a future where we're happily married. Bliss, torn asunder by the grievous moment of waking. However, last night's dream featured somebody else in a romantic fashion (not like that, if you catch my drift, that's not why it's embarrassing. Thought I'd better clear that up), a most confusing turn of events which led to me waking with a cry of "what the HELL?".
As I say, this had me more than a little confused and wondering if I was trying to tell myself something about just exactly who it is I'm in love with. After one hell of a lot of soul searching, I've decided that it in that respect was just a meaningless dream. However, through that thinking process I have learned a couple of things about myself and life in general, which (sorry) I've decided to keep to myself.
It's not all good, though. Aside from giving me yet another thing to worry about in this time of general stress and heartache, this particular dream had another negative side-effect: I felt guilty for most of the morning for (in my dream) trying to break up a (real-life) couple. It was a bloody dream and I got guilt! For God's sake, this should be enough to convince you all that dreams are bad, evil little buggers.
Despite my tight-lipped refusal to elaborate on my epiphanies, I can't deny that dreams can teach us things, but they are still a bit evil at times. I don't think the functions they perform are enough for me to willingly sacrifice a third of my life to sleeping and dreaming and I'd still jump at the chance of functioning without sleep, but maybe I'd still set aside one or two days a month to visit dreamland.
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