I’ve been dreaming a lot lately. I’m not sure what to attribute this to other than the fact that I went through about a month of not having any dreams at all. Now suddenly, almost every night I’ve been having vivid memorable dreams that stay with me till morning and then bug me for the rest of the day.
I’ve often read about people using sleep to solve problems. Sounds funny, you say? Well, lots of folks find that thinking about something right before you go to bed and then “sleeping on it†allows their brain to work on the problem at night. Some people even say they wake up in the morning and their problem is solved. I know there’s some recent neuroscience research to back up this kind of thing, but I’m too lazy to look it up just right now.
Anyway, I’ve never had any problems magically solved by sleeping on them, but I do find that I work best in the first 3-4 hours after I wake up. Really, in terms of productivity, the rest of the day is basically down hill from there. I don’t know if this because it is peaceful in the morning and I can work undisturbed, or if my brain just functions better then, but I really seem to get the most accomplished early in the day, the earlier the better. My fav philosophical guitarist D. Bailey claims that he plays best after just waking up from sleeping. So maybe there is something to all this sleep stuff.
But back to the dreams. Sometimes I have dreams about people I haven’t thought about in a while. That’s always a strange phenomenon because I wake up and think about those people and it’s almost like we had a talk in the dream.
Once I had a dream conversation with someone that I hadn’t spoken to in a long time. It was an awful conversation and the person ended up yelling at me and telling me they never wanted to speak to me again. Strangely enough, I had just been thinking about calling that individual just prior to having that dream. But the dream was so intense, and I felt so genuinely disgusted by my dream interaction, that I decided not to call them.
That was probably really weird of me to decide not to do something based on a dream, which after all, was something created inside my own head. But I didn’t take it as a kind of sign or omen or anything like that. It’s just that my dream conversation killed my desire to give that person a call.
People seem to either make too much, or not enough of dreams these days. I don’t know where I stand on the issue.
Me, you ask? I find entertainment in making too much of my dreams. It’s one of my favorite pastimes. But mine are always super weird, completely realistic, yet completely surreal, so it’s just fun.
I’ve had some very vivid dreams involving people I haven’t seen in a while. I can’t attribute their presence in my dreams to anything I thought about before sleeping, but later the next day, I really had to remind myself that the events of the dream has not actually happened. I even dreamed one night a while back that Dave and I had gotten into a fight and I woke up the next morning in a bad mood. Sleep is fascinating, but it has never solved any of my problems, either.