Recurring elements in my dreams

Two things have been recurring in my dreams every night for the past couple of weeks.

1. A woman who wants an arranged marriage to two men. In the dreams, she's a close acquaintance/casual friend, but it isn't anyone I know IRL. She wants to be married to two men and is putting out personal ads and using matchmaking services to find appropriate candidates. Just to make things more interesting, she doesn't want two men who know each other already - she wants to meet and court them both separately - and she wants to marry them both at the same time in a single wedding ceremony. This all has nothing whatsoever to do with the plot of my dreams. She's just someone who's around and I happen to know these few details about her personal life. It's like how on Corner Gas, Wanda has a child but the vast majority of the time that's irrelevant. Or on Dexter, that guy with the hat (what's his name?) is having marriage troubles, but most episodes it doesn't show up and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the plot.

2. Your sense of self is fully formed at the age of 32. This is frequently presented in my dreams as an indisputable fact. You know how there's that recent meme that your fertility starts declining at age 26? This idea is everywhere in a similar fashion in my dream universe. It's quoted in magazines and people make life decisions based on it. Last night in my dream, there was an ad in a newspaper for a famous hairdresser who was about to retire, and the ad was encouraging everyone to book an appointment with her today because you want to have good hair before the age of 32 so your sense of self includes good hair.

My predreams are carnivorous

Last night as I was waiting to fall asleep, I predreamed that I was in my kitchen preparing breaded chicken. The chicken was in a baking pan thing, and I was expertly seasoning it as though I knew exactly what I was doing.

I've never prepared breaded chicken in my life. I don't think I know how to prepare breaded chicken. There has never been chicken in this apartment. And yet I was seeing this image in the first person. It was definitely a predream as opposed to a proper dream, because I was awake and deliberately shifting position as I settled myself in my bed and thinking about something completely unrelated, but I've never before had a predream image that did not come from reality.

Things I am currently wondering

1. Why don't we cough or sneeze in our sleep?

2. Do men who change their facial hair frequently always have the same facial hair in dreams as they do IRL? Or can it be anything? Is it possible to have a dream where you have facial hair that you've never had IRL? I suppose the same could hold for head hair for people who change their hairstyles frequently, but I find head hair rarely comes into play in dreams, whereas facial hair would come into play any time you're eating or kissing or having sex.

My subconscious has a strange sense of humour

Warning: don't read this if you're squeamish about blood.

Last night I dreamed I was sitting in the blood room from Dexter with Eddie Izzard, chatting about arm hair removal. Eddie's hair removal technique was something entirely new to me, but it seemed like it would be just the thing for my own (IRL) problem arm hair. And we were sitting there on the floor having this whole girl-talky conversation, not caring at all that we were sitting in a giant pool of dead prostitute blood.

When I woke up I was menstruating heavily. By the time I got that sorted, I'd completely forgotten what the miraculous hair removal technique was.

Strange as it seems my musical dreams are rather bad

Lately I've been having recurring bad dreams about having to practise music. It's different music every time - sometimes I'm playing clarinet in the high school band, sometimes it's piano, sometimes it's something I've never done publicly IRL like singing or playing guitar. I can't quite classify them as nightmares because they aren't terrifying, it isn't the "OMG exam and I haven't studied!" dream, it's just that I'm obligated to practise because other people are depending on me to be able to play competently, and it's this huge burdensome chore. It's not even the standard "Aww man, another thing on my to-do list!" ennui that everyone gets once in a while, it's this massive burden, disproportionate to what it ever was in real life. It's like I never had any choice about getting involved in the musical performance thing that's requiring all this practising, but I can't quit and people are depending on me to deliver a good performance just like people depend on me to deliver good translations.

I wonder what this all means?

Dreaming in black and white

Did people still used to dream in black and white before TV/movies/photography were invented? Because if you were completely unfamiliar with black and white images IRL, black and white dreams would be so bizarrely arbitrary!

Open Letter to my Subconscious

Dear Subconscious:

Sex is a nice thing to dream about. So is flying. A quest or adventure dream is always good. Being a character in any work of fiction is a fun way to spend a night, and being given a plot that I can use to write my own fiction is always worthwhile. Barring that, I can appreciate any dream that will make a good anecdote, even if it is a nightmare.

So why the fuck did you make me spend all last night being 11 years old and stuck in the back of my parents' car while they drove all over suburbia doing boring errands???? Frankly, I'd rather have had a panic attack dream that woke me up at 4 in the morning! At least then once I'd recovered my equilibrium I could get some gaming in before my alarm went off!

Best sleepwalk ever?

Last night I went to bed wearing black socks.

This morning I woke up wearing white socks.

I was alone in the apartment all night and have no memory of dreaming or waking up.

Bizarre dream sequence

When my alarm went off this morning, I couldn't open my eyes so I decided to skip exercising and sleep for another hour. I promptly fell back asleep and had an extremely vivid dream - everything from the colours to the plot to the emotions were way stronger than usual. Then I woke up. Five minutes had passed. So I closed my eyes again and had another extremely vivid dream. Then I woke up. Five minutes had passed. So I closed my eyes again and this happened again.

This went on for a full hour and a half. Extremely vivid dreams, each five minutes long. The weird thing is, when I woke up in between, I couldn't get out of bed. I could sit up and look at the clock, but I was somehow incapable of rolling out of bed and starting my day.

Nothing like this has ever happened before. I quite enjoyed the dreams though. I wish I knew how to make them happen again.

I think I've been thinking about Ontario politics too much

I thought I wasn't paying enough attention to the Ontario election, but then last night I had a dream.

I dreamed that McGuinty, Hampton, and Tory were having a debate about the value of MMP. (No, I don't know why De Jong wasn't invited to my dream.) They all kept using the word consensus to mean something different, and couldn't agree on what it actually meant. (Yeah, I know...) So I offered to look it up in the dictionary for them, but I had trouble because I didn't know about the invisible U between the N and the first S. (Yes, the invisible letters schtick is an Eddie thing.) So then I remembered about the invisible U and looked it up and found the definition. So I raised my hand and said that I'd found the definition. But John Tory wouldn't shut up for long enough for me to tell them the definition. He just kept talking and talking and wouldn't shut up. So I punched him in the teeth.

Seriously, that was my dream. Maybe I need to back off politics for a while.

My subconscious is being mean to me

For the past week or so, I've been having an utterly fascinating dream every time my alarm went off. Something extremely interesting was always happening, or I was learning something mindboggling, or I was about to make some monumental achievement that I never in my wildest fantasies hoped possible. And my alarm would always interrupt. So then I wanted to roll over and go back to sleep to see what happens next, AND my dreams have sometimes (but not always) permitted me to do so.

So as a result, I've been muddling through the past week without proper breakfast or yoga, always running late for everything.

Why can't I have the fascinating dreams earlier in the night, or on weekends when I can sleep in as long as I like?

Dreams

I'm becoming increasingly convinced that I can see the future in my dreams. My whole life, every so often I'd be in a situation and get a déjà vu from a dream. Usually it's only a moment - imagery plus train of thought - and then the dream moves on to something else in service of a greater plot. But I definitely have dream déjà vu (déjà revé?).

For example, in Grade 9, I had a dream where the answers to my Geography exam were on the blackboard, but I didn't pay attention to them because I was distracted by the emotions I was feeling at the time. Then, several weeks later, we were taking up our Geography exam in class, but I was distracted by a situation in my social life that was causing me to experience those exact same emotions. But then, an objective observer could have told you that emotional situation was forthcoming, and, while I am convinced that the exam answers in my dream were the real answers, I didn't actually see them. So that one could be explained away.

But just now, I was looking at the menu of a DVD while thinking about whether I want to attend a barbecue, and I was overcome with déjà vu. I have had a dream where I was thinking these thoughts while looking at these images.

But I'm looking at this DVD for the first time ever. I only just heard about the movie recently, and have never even seen it advertised. I'm seeing the images for the first time, and the general idea has been in my brain only a few days. Similarly, I just got the invitation to the barbecue maybe an hour ago. I did not expect to be invited to a barbecue, and I would never have guessed that the people who issued this invitation would invite me to anything. But I have definitely dreamed this moment before.

Predreaming

I've noticed a kind of cool phenomenon just as I'm falling asleep. While I lie in bed waiting for sleep to overcome me, I tend to think about various things in a deliberate manner (i.e. they aren't just random thoughts that occur to me). Just before I fall asleep, my brain starts providing its own visual images to go with these thoughts. But the images don't match at all, they're just random things culled from my recent experience. So the words my brain is thinking end up superimposed over a picture I saw in the newspaper or that weird and complex table in my latest translation that I'm going to have to figure out how to edit on Monday or the layout of the last website I was looking at. This isn't lucid dreaming because I'm awake, and I do have full control over my thoughts, just not the images. It's like a powerpoint slideshow or a youtube fan tribute gone amok.

Pyrotelekinesis

Last night I dreamed I had a lighter in my purse. I was at work in the dream, and for some reason I walked out into the hallway and started playing with the lighter, flicking it on and off. Then several co-workers burst out into the hallway and yelled at me for smoking, speculated whether I was smoking cigarettes or pot, and threatened to tell my mother. I insisted that I wasn't smoking, but for some reason I kept the lighter hidden behind my back - I don't know if this was because a lighter was contraband, or because it's kind of stupid to be standing in the hallway playing with a lighter.

Then I woke up to the fire alarm going off in my apartment building.

Seriously! True story!

(And no, there wasn't actually a fire in my building.)