Wednesday, August 25, 2010

I Mess Up While Dreaming

I've been busy these past few days with remarkably mind-numbing, soul-crushingly boring stuff. One of the real downsides of this is that I haven't been able to do anything fun during the day, which means that I can only have fun at night. So yeah, the most excitement I've had recently has been in bed. I wish this had any of the implications you might be thinking of. What it actually means is that what little excitement I've been having recently has all been in my dreams. This will also have an adverse affect on my posting. Sorry.

A while ago, I got really interested in dreams (mine, in particular). I went so far as to think about keeping a dream journal. I never started one, but I often bored my breakfast friends by trying to tell them what had happened in my dreams. This, of course, never worked well, first off because my breakfast friends were all imaginary. Furthermore, my dreams, like most people's, rarely made sense, so there I was explaining that 'I didn't know how I ended up in a room that looked sort of like this place we had been to, but different' to myself. Yeah.... 

Anyway, one of the things that really interested me was lucid dreaming. The idea is that, mid-dream, you can recognize that you are actually in a dream, and then take control of your dream. The trick to do this is apparently to pay attention to minute details at all times. Then, in the middle of a dream, if you notice some detail that doesn't make sense, you can say, "Aha! I'm dreaming!" and instantly start flying, or in my case, make more friends. This is dangerous, because if you find yourself often saying "that doesn't make sense" in the middle of the day, like I do, you might think you're always in a dream. I'm not sure what affect this would have on your life, other than to make you a bit more philosophical.

So no shit, there I was, asleep in my bed, dreaming. I dreamed I was camping on a trail. I wandered down the trail to look around, and I saw a pond that had the most amazing fish in it, bright blue with white stripes, yellow dots like eyes on its tail, 6 feet tall, swimming around gazing at me. The woods were amazingly beautiful, there was some furry creature wandering around, all sorts of things that I would want to take a picture of. So I dreamed to myself, "I should get my camera so I can take a picture of this!" That was exactly when the lucid dreaming started: "Wait. There's no fish that looks like that, and what's more, I think he's floating above the water. This doesn't make sense. This is totally a dream." Now, this is when I should have fulfilled my wildest dreams. I had recognized I was dreaming. For a few minutes, I could have had anything I wanted. Wealth. Fame. Popularity. A pet dog. Any useful skill at all. Instead, I thought to myself, "Huh. But I'll bet if I could get my camera, I could take pictures of these, and then they'd be on my camera when I wake up! That'd be sweet." Then I got distracted on my way back to the tent and never even took pictures.

Good job, dream Brendan. You're an idiot.

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