This is my interesting dream. I found myself in a mental hospital only it looked like a cheesy funeral home with plastic potted plants. I told them that I was a social worker and wasn’t supposed to be there. That didn’t work. Then they told me that it was 1963. I knew that it was 2008 but I was smart enough to not tell them that. But I also knew there was a big difference in mental health from 1963 to 2008 so I had to get out of that place. I convinced them to let me prove my identity. So the staff and I drove all the way back to Pennsylvania and I had to figure out where my Mom was going to be in 1963 and get her to vouch for me without having her freak out that I was a middle aged man rather than a little baby. We didn’t find her but I did get to see my hometown in 1963 and we stopped by the restaurant where my Mom was a waitress way before 1963. We had the daily special. They had the best mashed potatoes and gravy. Mom always said to order the daily special. Then I woke up. Whew.
Don’t bother analyzing this or I’ll start telling you more dreams to mess with you.
One night last week just before bedtime, I received an e-mail from Mick Woodruff.
He wrote to tell me that he recently met Joanie Madden after a CTL show, and he also sent a photo of himself standing with her.
With that imagery fresh in my mind, I went to bed and dreamed that I also met Joanie, and she introduced me to her husband, John Madden (yes, THAT John Madden)!
But I wonder if you could even call that an ‘interesting dream’… I’m sure Joanie would call it a nightmare!
One of the most fascinating things to me about dreams is the decay in dream recall. We probably don’t have any memory of most of our dreams. We hang on to memories of a small number. Many people, including myself, wake up remembering dreams and have that memory decay rapidly–usually in minutes or an hour or two. Just night before last I had a long and complicated dream. I got up and I was drinking coffee, I said, I need to remember this one. Can’t remember today anything about it. Of course, if you write it down, you’ve got it. Also, if you keep rehearsing and going over it in your head, you’re more likely to remember it.
But, it’s hard to think of any other kind of memory that has that kind of decay curve, when there’s a story or narrative to it.
For most folks, musical memory decays fast. If a person hears a melody line, they can often hold it in their mind for a few minutes. If it isn’t recorded in some fashion quickly, it disappears into the ether.
I had a dream last night. I remember the part of stepping through the portal into an alternate reality/dream/wake state. Kind of a spooky yet overall a pleasant dream. If I had written the notes as soon as I woke up, it would be in more detail. For some years, I did write down the dreams, but this year, I am doing less of the journaling and such and living more in the moment.
Once upon a time I was a student at a creative writing class. They advised us to keep a dream-diary: a notebook in which we would write down our dreams, the morning after we experienced them.
It was an excellent exercise in learning speed and accuracy in getting the details down. I still have the notebook that I kept. The first two pages are a couple of vague sentences each. The last are detailed and concise.
Last night I woke up several times during the night, and each time I reviewed what I had been dreaming about. In the past I have kept a dream journal, and the contents are interesting and amusing to reread years later. Last night the last dream sequence before waking in the morining found me and my wife wandering around a large building, trying to find an exit. We kept going into different rooms only to find that they didn’t lead to the outside. One path did lead to the outside both it was an upstairs balcony. The walls were stone, and it looked like an old castle. There was no sense of panic just some frustration in not being able to find a way out. Finally I popped my head through the ceiling tile, and I saw that the room above was a restaurant and that there were many people sitting at tables enjoying their meals. I’m not sure how we managed it, but soon we were able to pop up into the restaurant and sit ourselves at a table. Before I was able to take the first bite of what appeared to be delicious food, I woke up.
In my dream Mr T and I are sleeping at my parent’s place - they are not at home - when I hear movement in the kitchen: probably a rat. So I get up and walk heavily towards the kitchen, hoping to scare it. I turn on the light to find a new born puppy on the chopping board. I struggle to know what to do with it - toss it outside or protect it? I decide it needs a warm cloth and box to sleep in and am looking for the cloth when I awake.
In his sleep, Mr T hears me walking heavily and complains that I’m interupting his music practice. He’s on his way out of the music room to find out what I’m doing when he wakes up.
The question is… who was actually walking heavily given that we were both asleep???
Last night I dreamed I was putting on my socks and I noticed a big black bump on my right big toe, which was getting larger as I looked. It didn’t hurt. I rubbed it, and the black dead skin came off and there was a perfectly formed big toe growing out of my regular big toe. Then I noticed there were tiny toes growing between my other toes on my right foot. When I touched them, they grew long stalks at the base then fell off and disappeared. Then I noticed that I had 10 toes on my left foot as well. I thought “well, no wonder my shoes aren’t comfortable.”
More like the culmination of a week of stress from not having my own transportation; working a 10-hour day Friday (being told 5 minutes before I was to be off that they really needed me to stay!); writing a check for half what we had in checking for a used car on Sunday; and a 600 mile round trip on Monday, getting home around midnight.
