…Say the darnest things
Dreams are fascinating (lucid dreams even more so. But that’ll be a topic for another day), and it seems to me such a waste that most of us have such splendid dream realities and experiences but no recollections of them. Contrary to what some people think, everyone has dreams on a nightly basis since they are necessarily part of the REM phase of the sleep cycle that everyone goes through. Its just a matter of recalling them that’s tricky. To that end, keeping a dream journal helps - a notebook beside your pillow that’s used to record your dreams the first thing you wake up in the morning. If you don’t write them down immediately upon awakening, you will forget the dream. And yes, it does takes a hell lot of resolve to do consistently.
So maintaining a dream journal is something I’ve been doing for the past 5 months or so, and it never ceases to amuse me what the subconscious mind is capable of conjuring. The conversations that you hold with dream characters, especially - some of which are astonishingly coherent and may even hold personal revelations, while others seem like bad drama scripts written by a particularly mischievous 3rd grader.
One such dream conversation involved my friends and I waiting outside a bakery where a stereotypical snooty French chef was inside baking a cake. For some reason, we wanted a cake really bad. But the chef wants to have his cake and eat it at the same time, so he hands us only a small slice of it. At this point, one of my friends remarks “Shit. Don’t you wish Dumbledore was here?”. “Yeah”, my other friend replies “But be careful of wands because they’ll burst in flames if you chew them”. And we all nodded in sound agreement because it made perfect sense.
Another interesting dream I have recorded happened 3 nights after I watched the movie 300 (you can see where this is going, can’t you?). Kim Jung Il was holding a world conference of tyrants and dictators ala Team America: World Police. For some inexplicable reason I was there and sitting at the same table as Fidel Castro, who seems eager to take me as an apprentice. “Tonight,” says Castro without the slightest hint of irony “We dine in Havana!”