Meet Me at the Turnstile

 What do you think about dreams?

I think about the dreams I have a fair amount. It's one of my more hippie-ish qualities. I think that I used to be a more vivid dreamer than I currently am. I would wake up and the feelings of what I had just experienced would be so real. I knew that what happened wasn't real, but there would be about 10 minutes where my body still believed it was. Crazy and intense feelings that felt lived in. That led to me learning a bit about lucid dreaming, which I thought would be an amazing skill to master.

One of the things recommended to get better at lucid dreaming was to keep a dream journal, which I guess helps you to realize the things that recur in your dreams. That worked a bit, and I've lucid dreamed (dreamed lucidly?) a few times, but it's never been something that I've really worked at or something that I coveted. A result of this though, is that I've kept a dream journal, with varying degrees of upkeep, since my early twenties. I started this journal with the goal of working towards lucid dreaming, but what I found much more rewarding about it was being able to revisit dreams I've had and getting, what seems to me to be, a window into my subconscious.

I took an intro psych class in my undergrad and I didn't retain all that much from it. The two things I do remember was my weird hippie teacher explaining Pavlov with a story about béarnaise sauce (and that he said it as sauce béarnaise) and a tutorial discussion about dream interpretation. The TA explained that ultimately dreams don't really mean anything and you can't draw any serious conclusions from them. At first that didn't make sense to me, as to me my dreams felt significant, but in hindsight I understand what she was saying. You can't draw any serious conclusions about a person or their situation from the content of their dreams. If someone was a suspect in a murder case and confessed to having a dream about being guilt-ridden and hiding a secret, it wouldn't mean shit. It would be suspicious, but it wouldn't mean anything concrete in regards to the case.

I still find them interesting to myself though. I find that small occurrences or worries tend to show up in a central way in my dreams. In that way, what happens in my dreams does two things. 1. It helps me to see what I'm worried or anxious about, because that tends to pop up regularly. 2. It can be reassuring to see events from my life re-happen in the dream.

I don't really speak with people about dreams, at least aside from Rebecca sometimes, but I think it's a nice idiosyncrasy of mine that helps in making my personality unique, even if I don't share that with other people. My interest in my own dreams, which I guess is an interest in introspection and self-awareness, has to bleed over into other parts of my personality and existence, right?

Duff recommended Horses by Patti Smith this week. It's great.