I've always been a vivid dreamer. I usually remember a fair amount from my dreams, too. Unfortunately I've also always been prone to nightmares. I remember being in high school and saying in English class that I still had nightmares pretty much nightly; everyone else looked at me like I was a freak. I had no idea that most people pretty much stop having nightmares as they enter their teens. Oh. Gee, would have been nice if someone had told my brain that.
(Just for you, Prin-the angry butt-head returns!)I know that dreams come in different varieties-you have your Jungian archetype dreams where your subconscious is trying to tell you something or work out something your conscious mind doesn't want to deal with, your prophetic dreams (had too many to disbelieve. Even if it's another form of unconscious mind communicating with conscious mind, hey, why ignore useful information?) and then there's the general mental housecleaning type of dream. My brother expressed the theory to me years ago that sometimes, your brain just throws together a bunch of stuff you're not using anymore, and there you go! One messed up bunch of images.
Or to put it in Calvin and Hobbes terms...
I like to put that notion together with a theory of memory as a type of warehouse that Stephen King writes about in the novel Dreamcatcher. Essentially, the idea is that your memory has only so much space to store stuff. Frequently used stuff is readily accessed, while older stuff goes into deep storage. When you run out of room, some of the deep storage gets cleared out to make way for new stuff. So, I think sometimes your brain gives you a review process at night; if it's something that's important after all, your dream refreshes it and sends it back to storage. Otherwise, sayonara name of the kid that sat beside in third grade! See you later, telephone number from the second house you ever lived in!
Last night, I got a particularly vivid mishmash. And if I woke up, scratching my head wondering what the heck that was all about, as soon as I fell asleep again, I got the same scene with different details, like my brain was saying "Oh, didn't like that? How about now? No? Now?". Weird.
They just shouldn't ever let the inmates run the asylum.
8 comments:
Or... Maybe old memories are like layers of earth. They gradually get crunched down by the pressure of the layers that pile up on top, and they compress into nice sparkly diamonds... :D
Vivid good or vivid bad?
I had nightmares as a teen too. I think most people stop just because they start sleeping harder than they used to..
Oh and lol at the butthead. He's my favorite butthead.
And my boss caught me reading your blog twice today so far. lol Troublemaker! :D
Vivid weird. Just a real jumble of stuff. It went from some Egyptian temple themed thing to a temple full of pools and waterfalls, to the swimming pool where I had my lessons as kid, to my old neighbourhood at night, to locker rooms at a Zeller's store/college campus (don't ask how it could be both-I just don't know) to the tunnels under Carleton University, all with a cast of thousands (many of whom were from TV).
By the time I was under the Zeller's store, my guy and I were listening to a band practicing so we could get clues to solve elaborate math formulae to figure out which door to take next. But we were teenagers, which is odd because we didn't meet until we were 25.
Very strange. The only really disturbing part was the wrestlers doing some sort of water ballet thing. You don't want to know.
Oh. Ok. That's pretty vivid.
My school is Zellers (aka a cheap sellout).
Mayyyybe somebody you know in Egypt is naive like you were in your kiddie pool. Hmm....... ;)
LOL! I knew if I mentioned Egypt that something like that would come up!
lol how'd you know? I'm such a cynical pessimist.:D
The cup isn't half full, it's 2/3 empty. :P
I loooved "dreamcatcher"!! The movie kinda sucked but if you read the book beforehand, it wasn't so bad. And nightmares... they come at any age, my dear. The subconscious is a very strong instinct and it doesn't follow a map nor a calendar - unfortunately.
I agree with you entirely on both the book and the movie!
I'm pretty sure that teenagers have more nightmares than they think; I've just always had a knack for remembering my dreams (no matter what kind they are!) and some of them were pretty funny, even if they were technically nightmares.
I dreamed once that my friend and I were being chased by Freddy Kruger, and she managed to stop him by wishing that every piece of gum she ever swallowed would drop on him. It did, and since she was a big gum chewer and almost always swallowed the stuff, it was a huge boulder of gum that got him. She laughed about that for years. :D
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