This is not a big discovery of mine, not anything new or revolutionary, just a statement of fact that’s been brought home to me today by my adventures last night in the land of Nod.
For one thing, it’s weird how you can have a dream that seems to be ongoing or recurring over several REM cycles or sleep segments during the night. I rarely sleep for six or eight hours at a stretch. If I’m lucky, I can get three or four stretches of an hour to two hours a night, more or less. That’s what happened last night, yet I woke up this morning pretty sure that I had experienced some variation of the same “anxiety dream” in each sleep segment.
Or is that a false memory? I’ve heard that you only remember the dream that you were dreaming when you woke up. Maybe as I woke up I was dreaming that I was having a dream broken up into several segments over the night, but in reality the dream (of a dream) which I remembered occurred in just a few seconds or minutes before I woke up.
No way to tell, but thinking about it gets very “Inception“-like very quickly.
Either way, the “anxiety” in the “anxiety dream” came (all night or in the dream within the dream) in the form of finding out that some of our passports were expired just as we were packing to get on the plane in a few hours for a trip to London. (What a freakin’ idiot my subconscious must think I am to let that detail go until the last minute. Has my subconscious ever looked in a mirror and seen the somewhat obsessive, detail oriented, control freak that plans our trips?) From there it was “how can we get new passports,” “can we get our money back,” “can we find another way out of this,” blah, blah, blah. Like I said — anxiety.
All day I’ve been wondering — what was my subconscious trying to tell me? Is there a warning in there? Am I forgetting or overlooking something on an upcoming trip or some other big event?
Or was my subconscious just screwing with my head — literally. “Hey, Id and Superego, come here! Look at what I can do to him, and he can’t even stop me! He’ll be shitting bricks over this for days!”
On the final pass through the basic scenario, the dream changed to a situation where I was meeting new neighbors, being sniffed by their dog, and having him lick my hand. At which point I woke up to find Jessie licking my hand to wake me up…
It’s so odd how your brain can take real-world phenomenon and warp them a bit to stick them into your dream. Again, is it trying to let you know something the only way it can, like Lassie barking to tell you that Timmy’s fallen down the well?
At least I didn’t dream that I was eating the world’s biggest marshmallow, only to wake up and find my pillow gone.
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 