The car

Frist is Continuing this week’s theme of dreams we have… actual dreams. Well perhaps, I only really have the “Ten Years Time” essay and the “Big Dreams” article in the chambers so now I’m floundering, stuck with a theme that I only had the vaguest idea of what to write on that theme. Let’s just go with actual dreams today shall we? This feels like that game you play at Toastmasters, “Table Topics” I believe. In which you are assigned a random subject and then have to talk about it for two minutes. It’s an incredibly transformative exercise, being able to improvise a two-minute speech on the spot, but I digress. Beside my bed, on a modern designed dark wood small chest of drawers lays a pink hardback book with “Brain Dump and Dream Journal 2/3/17 =>” written on the cover. This is my dream journal and I’ve been writing down my dreams since March of this year, actually I was doing it before then, but that notebook is full of unsent letters to an ex-girlfriend, the outlines of a concept album I’ll probably never make (it mostly concerned the aforementioned ex-girlfriend) and ramblings not dissimilar to the one you’re reading now. Anyway, I’ve been recording my dreams for close to a year now and to be honest, it hasn’t really affected my life in a major way. I believe I originally started writing down my dreams in an effort to learn how to lucid dream. This was an attempt to super-charge my personal development by being able to spend time in my brain-space so I could learn whilst I slept. Similarly, I don’t think it’s helped me with my dream recall either. Although I could remember most of my dreams before I began this exercise, I suppose I now have a record of dreams I’ve had until my home burns down or something. What has been incredible is reading back at the abstract nature of dreams.I remember one dream I had in which I was traversing a canyon in which the local flora were backpack trees that were shaped like rib-cages. Once I got to the end of the canyon, it turned out that I was in a Fall Out Boy music video and I was suddenly shunted all the back through the canyon (although this time it was like Beetlejuice’s house from the film, Beetlejuice). Is this useful? Maybe (?!) On a family camping holiday I met a man named Marcus who was a psychotherapist, he told me that one common misconception about dreams was that what happens in the dream is relevant. The events of the dream don’t matter at all, what the important part is are the *emotions* that you feel when you’re dreaming. The emotions that you feel when you’re dreaming are, according to Marcus, the sub-conscious mind expressing itself. If you’re worried/scared/nervous or any of the other emotions that we tend to hide from the world, they’ll come out in your dreams. I used to read a lot of comic books, I still sit down with the occasional graphic novel, but back in the day I read a tonne of superhero books. One of the concepts that is frequently explored in comic books is the idea of parallel dimensions, universes that are similar to our own but slightly different. As a kid I came up with this idea that when we dream we were just seeing through the eyes of an us in a different dimension and that when *we’re* awake our other-dimensional selves see what we see. So an alternate universe version of me would tell their girlfriend (it’s nice to think that in a universe somewhere, I have a girlfriend) “I had the weirdest dream, I was writing about how weird dreams are!” When I grew up and read about the different possible dimensions, I was amazed. My childhood idea was somewhat correct. With the multi-dimensional theory you go up through each of dimensional levels until you get to dimension seven (perhaps, check out the “10 dimensions” videos on YouTube”) a seventh dimensional being has the ability to traverse the infinite possible universes. That is to say, with an infinite possible universes there is a certainty of my canyon adventure existing in another reality! To think of all the possible different universes is both terrifying and wonderful. On one hand you realise (if you prescribe to the theory) that everything you do is inherently worthless and there’s nothing in the universe with an objective purpose OR you think that of all the different realities you could be experiencing, you get to be in this one. For every lovely dream in which you and you school crush walk hand-in-hand through the school (an actual dream I had when I was 15, her name was Rachel Stringer) there is a nightmare (I often have dreams about driving a car that gets faster and faster until I can’t control it anymore), if the theory of infinite universes is correct then there is a place where you are forced to live that nightmare every day. But you don’t, you live here. I love the abstract nature of dreams and I’m fascinated by what they tell us about ourselves (like because you can “see” in your dreams that must mean what you “see” in real life is filtered through your mental processes, therefore no one actually “sees” the same thing as each other), but the thing I like about dreams the most is that they are fleeting. A holiday to a different dimension if you will. But here, in this reality, you don’t have to have nightmares because you could stop the car at any time.