The Strangest Dream I've Had Recently

It's another Long And Short Reviews blog prompt: What was the strangest dream you've had recently?

I've not had a very strange one recently. At least, not that I remembered.

During my lifetime psychologists have learned some things about dreams. Everyone dreams, though people of regular habits often don't remember their dreams. That's because a complete sleep cycle ends at a level of brain activity in which dreams are forgotten. Waking up quickly from "rapid eye movement" sleep, the dreaming stage, also causes dreams to be forgotten. To remember a dream we have to wake up at a time that's "wrong" for us, yet have time to wake up slowly enough to store at least some of that unconscious brain activity in conscious memory. No wonder so many people, otherwise mentally healthy, don't remember a dream once in five years. The dreams these people do remember are likely to be ominous ones, if not nightmares.

There have been times in my life, often periods of geriatric nursing work, when I remembered a lot of dreams. The insights I gained form these dreams included, primarily, that my dreams are generally mundane, full of thoughts and memories from my daytime life, not at all rich in Freudian or Jungian symbols. Most of the ones I remember aren't publishable in any detail because their details involved living people and their stories, which I'm not authorized to tell. My dream images tend to be remixed from real life, things like finding an antique book with a specific poem in it. Very often I dream about a job I'm doing. Several dreams I've had recently have been about what to post on this blog.

I've often dreamed about shopping and buying things I was looking for. The only strange thing about these mundane dreams is that often, though not always, I've dreamed about finding something that had been hard to find on the morning of the day I found it. Maybe the dream motivated me to look. 

My dreams often seem to begin with pictures--that picture-thinking I did as a young child, and was aware of doing less around my sixth birthday. Then as I start to wake up and return to thinking in words, the dreams acquire a sound track. Those other people whose stories I have no right to tell come in, talking.

Sometimes the way the pictures reflect reality is at least amusing. Once while waking up quickly to help a patient get to the bathroom I dreamed about a fantastically decorated cake. While the patient was using the bathroom I had time to realize where that image had come from. The patient had awakened me, as she often did, by turning on a lamp. The elaborately beaded lampshade was short and wide enough to resemble a cake--the sort of elaborately decorated one bakeries used to set in windows with no intention of actually selling. Often, to save expense and make one show-off piece last longer, the buttercream icing was spread on a cardboard box rather than a real cake. In the dream I remembered, people were slicing up this ornate cake, and its base turned out to be not cardboard but cornbread.

Very often the predominant picture in my dreams is a landscape. Since I can't tell the stories of the human interactions that add drama to a dream that starts with the image of a field, or forest, or beach, let me at least share a nice beach picture with those for whom this summer has been hot and dry.

Photo by Ngrigor at Morguefile.com.