It’s my understanding that dreams are essentially made of various random memory fragments that your brain pieces together during REM while it’s focusing on repairing the rest of your body.
And it’s for that reason that sometimes I wonder if being a writer and a storyteller has the potential to work against me because although sometimes I have these really random, highly creative dreams like the ones that I like to share here on my blog, occasionally I also have much worse ones that aren’t anything like a story that I’d actually be interested in writing in any capacity in real life…
Those kinds of dreams often include a lot of fighting – typically with people who I’m not in real life, along with nasty disputes with my wife, and in one I even watched myself try to commit suicide. Last night’s bad dream was this complex drama about how my wife had to go to jail for a while and when she came back we had this big falling out because I felt like I had been abandoned and she didn’t want to talk about it.
It’s kind of like dreaming a Tim Burton movie – everything starts off clear, but a little odd, and then things start getting more and more bizarre … but not bizarre in a good way – just weird … and eventually you find yourself at a point where you desperately just want the whole thing to be over, yet you’re far too invested to simply get up and walk away without knowing how the whole thing ends.
The thing is, most of the bad dreams that I end up having myself don’t end and thus I’ll spend the first part of my day in sort of a funky mood trying to remind myself that it was all just a dream and that my wife didn’t try to leave me and that I’m not fighting with so-and-so after all.
It’s a really weird sensation, but I wonder if it’s just one of those things where you have to take the good with the bad otherwise all of my dreams would just be boring and unoriginal across the board. 😕