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Had a dream last night.
Wanna know what it was about?
Didn’t think so.
So in this dream, I’m lying there thinking about something, not sure what. And as it was happening, it seemed like something important was going on – love or a momentous achievement — while at the same time, I couldn’t figure out what. Dreams are elusive. Like cats.
I then started thinking of writing about the dream, and that’s when the dream ended or became blurry in my mind. It became a transition from a weird but enthralling dream, to think about writing about the dream, to having no recall of what the dream was about.
Which means there’s nothing to share about this dream.
Except that I had one. Or maybe I didn’t. We’ll never know.
How long do dreams last? I’ve heard just a few seconds. But sometimes it seems as if they last for 10 minutes or a few hours and sometimes a lifetime. Do they ever last that long? How could anyone know?
As a person dreams, they don’t pull out a stopwatch and time the dream because they’re dreaming and you can’t dream and use a stopwatch simultaneously. Not doable. Or maybe they’re dreaming about a stopwatch.
There are other elusive characteristics involved with dreaming. Timing is perhaps the most intractable thing of all. Even if someone’s lying next to you, they can’t time the dream because you would have to wake from your dream, and tell the person you’re dreaming, but then your dream would be over.
You could try to go back to sleep and start dreaming again but what are the chances you’ll start dreaming about the same thing before you woke up to tell the person you were dreaming?
Never happened to me that I recall. Can you wake up from a dream and then will yourself to start dreaming about the same thing, like hitting pause on your remote and then starting the movie again?
The one dream I remember as a kid was getting stabbed by somebody for doing something and sitting in my basement chair with blood on my belly, sort of leaning back like a wounded soldier. I think I was in some sort of war and was stabbed in battle. Maybe I had been watching a war movie that night before going to sleep. I don’t like the idea of being stabbed. Shot me with a bullet, OK, but don’t stab me.
I dreamed about getting stabbed probably because I fear that happening. The night of the stabbing it’s also possible I had been playing basketball before going to bed and dreamed about getting stabbed in a war for some reason we’ll never know. It’s certain we’ll never know why I had that dream. There’s no one to ask. Confirmation is impossible. Some things are unknowable. This is one of those things.
Which reminds me of philosophy class in college. We read a book by some guy named Descartes who had a theory that all of our lives are dreams. Every waking moment, including this one, is a dream.
We’re dreaming right now as we have since we started to understand we were alive. At five years old, we dreamed all day; and six; and twenty-six, and now. Every time we open our eyes we’re dreaming.
Descartes – his theory.
So does that mean when we dream in our sleep that’s just a continuation of the dreams we have while awake? Descartes didn’t address that question, or maybe he did but I was more fixated on whether he was right about our waking moments being dreams. Doesn’t seem Descartes was thorough enough. I could drive a truck through his dream theory and afterward, stop at a truck weighing station and take a nap and dream about Tonka Toys.
Was he right?
Probably not. This waking moment feels too much like something more real, like the taste of a headlight donut in the morning. Right now doesn’t feel like I’m dreaming. It feels like I’m living a life that makes some sense, that has structure and meaning. Dreams while I sleep usually have neither.
So did Descartes get famous, so much so that I’m still remembering his dream theory some 40 years after I learned about him in college, by throwing out a tantalizing yet unprovable theory? Was he trying to build his personal brand, get more “likes,” aiming to leave a mark and immortalize himself, with his dream theory?
Probably.
I know people who do that. There’s this guy named Sammy Sportface. He writes blogs that don’t make any sense on purpose just so people will say “hey he’s the guy who writes blogs that don’t make sense.”
That guy needs to stop doing that. It’s pointless and repugnant. He needs to make a more solid contribution to society, advance an idea, share intelligent insights that progress the knowledge of mankind, psychoanalyze NBA players, and tell us why March Madness shatters dreams.
He needs to tie in dream theories in the context of one of the greatest songs ever made about dreams: “Dream Weaver” by Gary Wright.
These lyrics to this song make my year to dream about weaving a hammock while lying in a hammock on the Moon’s surface.
“Fly me away to the bright side of the moon
And meet me on the other side.”
No thanks, Gary. I don’t want to meet anyone on the other side of the moon. Nothing over there. Rather, I want to snooze in the hammock and dream about Descartes and his dream theory.
And listen to this song, “Only In My Dreams,” by Debbie Gibson who, you no doubt recall, triggered a Sportface reference after Clemson destroyed the Wake Forest football season last Fall.
It’s about dreaming. Was Deb dreaming when she wrote and recorded it? How could I know? I wasn’t there. Even if I had been, she wouldn’t have been able to tell me.
Same goes for Gary Wright, the weaver of dreams, whatever that means.
Then there’s Stevie Nix. She sang this song called “Dreams”:
Stevie is as real as any dream I’ve ever had.
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Sammy Sportface, a sports blogger, galvanizes, inspires, and amuses The Baby Boomer Brotherhood. And you can learn about his vision and join this group's Facebook page here:
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