{57} Dreamscraping

Last night, I had a vivid dream…not unusual, except for the fact that I remember it quite clearly.

It’s telling that what I do remember is the frustration of it. I was at a house and then I was trying to get to a beach, that’s the gist of it. What’s interesting to me was how frustrated I was by, well, everything. The house was confusing and rotting, but I was the only one who noticed; there was no direct route to the beach and I ended up skipping through several odd scenes only to arrive at the beach just as a major storm came ashore.

Details, details…there is more to that dream of course…interestingly there were squirmy fat naked rat-men with their asses stuffed with grass, kept as pets in part of the rotting house. Not by me, I should add. The rotting house was owned by a close friend, who would never in real life live in such a place. There was the pretty couple who were trying to make love as the old caboose they lived in sank in the roiling mud and I climbed out a broken window. The route to the beach felt too much like a 70s sci-fi movie a la Logan’s Run. The beach had an inlet that was paved like a boat ramp but treated as a tourist park, where people would pay to stand in the middle of the ramp and get knocked down by the large waves. I had to awkwardly change clothes three times through this dream, and not in the magical-dream way where you are just wearing new clothes, but the infuriating real-life way of too-small overheated dressing rooms.

As a skeptic, I don’t believe dreams are mystic messages from beyond, and I don’t expect them to be coherent. As best as I can tell, they are the psychological equivalent of farts, letting off the gaseous pressure of emotions/sensations in a harmless way. Which kind of tells me there is a lot of emotional off-gassing going on, even if I’m not sure what it all means. I’m scraping the bottom of my emotional barrel this past week, though.

Mostly I’m impressed I remember this much detail. Science says I dream whether I remember it or not, but I have not invested much energy or time trying to recall what I dream because I’m just not interested.

Which doesn’t mean I don’t think they are revealing, it’s just that interpretation is subject to the n=1 variance: dreams are all about the individual’s experiences.

In this case, I’m not entirely sure I want to know what these experiences might be. I know that trying to analyze such a bizarre collage of my brain’s off-hours workings is highly self indulgent and probably pointless. Yet, like all humans I’m a creature of pattern-seeking, and I want to know what all this means, aside from the obvious “you are stressing and things feel out of control.” Yeah, I got that much already thanks. :/

Also, the night of vivid dreams must have been exhausting, also an unusual phenomenon for me. I have spent most of today napping on and off, doing very little productive outside of getting my haircut and warming up leftovers for lunch.

Dear Brain: cut it out, I want more out of life than this. Thnxok.