may or may not be closer than they appear.

why do we dream at night? i know, i know, psychologists and other brain doctors will tell us that REM cycles include such fantastical explorations and exaggerations of reality to help stabilize our emotional and mental state. some theorize that dreams are a way of weaving our experiences into memory. i'm not content with either of these explanations though, because both suggest that we are unstable and perhaps require a split mind to solve these incongruencies-- one part of our brain is like "whooooooooaaaaa, help me out" and the other part takes over when we are not conscious (freaky!) and methodically rewires our thoughts at a very vulnerable hour.

my dreams are mostly unhelpful. for example, i dreamed that my mom was trying to drown me in a bathtub as a child. because i was small and the bathtub was unusually large, i was able to swim down to the drain and hide from her claw-like hands and super-human strength. the other night, i dreamed that i was feeding ostriches on a bird farm and they smelled like dry dirt and california valley heat. and, as always, i have the recurring dream that my dead friend's ex-boyfriend asks me to meet him in a deli, buys me a turkey sandwich, and tells me over and over that he is not my lighthouse. if my brain is actually sorting out my life events into some permanent memory, then my brain is sorely failing-- i am left with confusion and great disgust.

are your dreams productive? do they reveal new ideas or theories you may not have discovered in your waking hours?

in a blog post entitled "why do we dream?" from psychology daily, dr. ilana simons quotes freud's theory that dreams are poems we tell ourselves. she writes: "dreams allow us to be what we cannot be, and to say what we cannot say, in our more repressed daily lives" (par. 2). while i love the notion that i am artistically representing my experiences as metaphorical situations even in my sleep, i still find the idea of the split mind unsettling. why can't i confront my issues while i am awake? why must my brain handle it solo when i'm unaware?

what have you been dreaming about lately?