When you’re woken up in the middle of a dream, you feel cheated. Though it’s your own mind spinning the fantasy, conjuring friends, places, and situations for your amusement, it feels foreign. This morning I was in a place I enjoyed, seeing odd things like a stunt plane that flew like a helicopter, with a pilot half the size of the plane. There was an a capella group that did a multiplying act for an audience seated in an outdoor amphitheatre. Two singers became four, then eight. Though the audience knew the trick, we still applauded. Outside the amphitheater, I met some friends and planned a barbecue. We each arranged who would bring what, then I saw an old friend and had to convince her to join us. She was walking away, pretending not to see us. I was just about to talk to her when the dream ended, cut clean by the morning news on my alarm clock. Cheated out of a conversation that never existed, one that I created myself.
In dreams we ignore the fantastic and whimsical and seek normalcy: although people are flying through the air on bee wings, eating ice cream cones made of cotton, we’re just trying to catch a bus. In real life, we try to ignore normalcy and seek the fantastic and whimsical. If you doubt this, check out the most popular books and videos at the library—they ain’t non-fiction.
So here’s the thing that gets my cerebellum all in a twist: why can’t we loosen up our right brain so it can creep in a little more into left-brain work during the day? Highly creative people can do this, I suspect, and as a result they seem a little…well…weird. Someone who is all right brain would be a drooling lump, dreaming all day in a hallucinogenic fog. All left-brain people are, to put it mildly, not fun to be around. I’d like to drink from the intoxicating pool of the right brain more often. I can go there each night but I don’t often get to remember every dream, to wake with the taste still on my lips. Apparently I remember my dreams more than most people, and I know some unlucky souls who can’t remember anything. Gah! It’s like going to a movie and facing the back of the theater!
So I’ll finish with an image of a landscape that doesn’t exist, one created in the computer. I might find this place in my dreams someday, and will see what is left in the house. Or who.
Writer, architect, father, husband.
In my dream this morning I was in one of my vampire books. BH, with her little canines in my face scared me 😉
Dreams that I remember seem to occur most often right before I wake up in the morning so, perhaps, we're in a level of semi-consciousness–using more of that right brain than we allow ourselves to do during full conscious times during our awake times. Maybe we have to train our brains to click and drag parts of the right side into the left side during consciousness….hmmmmm.