I tend to sleep in three hour blocks, and have told myself for years now that I would start writing down my dreams every time I woke up. Think of all the ideas that I would save from being forgotten, I’d tell myself, not to mention the hundreds, maybe thousands of stories that were being lost each year alone. Add up all those years of dreaming, and well, you see what we’re all missing out on here.
Of course it never happens. You see, the thing about waking up every three hours or so is that all that motivation you had going into the sleep tends to become lost as you come out of it. Motivation, I’m thinking, is a lot like the details of a dream, with only a very small window of opportunity that must be grabbed onto in order for the whole thing to come together. Seriously, tell me this. How many dreamers do you know who are also motivated? I’m not saying they don’t exist, because they do, I know that. I’m just saying I’m not one of them.
And since I’m alone here in the house at the moment, I don’t see any others around who fit the description, so naturally, I’m forced to come to the conclusion that motivated dreamers are few and far between.
I don’t even see any out the window I’m sitting by, and I can see pretty far out this one.
But! Having said all that, it just so happens I was motivated enough last night to jot down some notes lying there in bed in the dark, the idea being that when the sun finally came up (which it is doing this very minute where I’m at) I would find myself looking at either something entertaining enough to share with the world, some deep, dark secret revealed to me for the first time, leading to a higher level of self-awareness and enlightenment, or a great, world-changing idea, which I would be happy to share with everyone for free. I dream generously, you should know, so there should be enough to go around.
Before I get to the dreams, however, I should let you know that when I woke up around 1 a.m. I was just a little bit angry. I wasn’t gritting my teeth or anything like that, which I think proves I’m a sensible, level-headed guy, because what I was angry about (just a little) was that the show I’d recorded and finally gotten around to watching wasn’t anything at all like how it’d been described in the synopsis, and I hate false advertising, even when I wake up at 1 a.m. Even more when it’s tricked me.
I’d recorded this show that’d claimed it was about some sort of Alaskan, Bermuda Triangle-style mystery. Alaskan natives tell of mysterious spirits that steal people in the Alaskan Triangle, or something like that the synopsis had read, but the whole show ended up being about a couple of planes that went missing and couldn’t be found after extensive searches. “Every resource was used to find the missing U.S. Senator - Senator! I should have known a politician was behind this! Besides, who in their right mind wants to find a missing Senator? - and to this day, his disappearance, along with those he was flying with, remains a mystery.
Now that I’m writing my own mystery involving a spirit, I thought it made good sense to promote myself to mystery expert, which I’m thinking, should speed up the writing of this book considerably. But that’s a side note, nothing more. Something to add to your vast collection of information about me.
Do you ever think about how much junk you put into your brain? No, I don’t either.
Anyway, I woke up mad not because the Senator (I forgot his name the moment they said it) stayed missing, but because the entire show, which had lured me there in the first place by promising stories from the Alaskan natives about mysterious spirits whisking away people, didn’t bother to talk with a single Eskimo about what was going on. They didn’t even bother to add a single mysterious, native drum beat to a single scene of this so-called Alaskan Triangle. And then they drew the area on the Alaskan map and that was when I really started getting mad. It wasn’t a triangle-shaped area at all that the people were disappearing in, but more of a trapezoid!
But enough about my emotional stability. To the dreams!
One
This first seemed to take place in a library, although it also had bookstore qualities about it, which ended up being true because when I started looking through a section of science fiction I found a small paperback with a slightly torn cover that I decided I was going to buy. The fun fact of this particular dream is that the author’s name, which escapes me now, happened to be some sort of combination of H.G. Wells and Herbert Hoover. Combine those two names somehow and that’s who wrote the book I was going to buy.
I was a grown man in the dream, but for whatever reason, my mom and dad had come to pick me up. They were still married, although I knew in the dream that they were, in fact divorced (as they are in waking life), and I found myself watching them from behind the stacks of books, noticing how they kept a distance from one another while they walked around, waiting on me.
I’m almost ready, I told them, deciding at the last second that I needed to find a book on ghosts, which this morning, brings up what I suppose is a valid question. Do I actually need to do some research on ghosts for the hermit’s story? Should I try to work in some valid ghost facts, or just wing it and make up all my own?
Two
Around 3:30 a.m. I woke again, this time jotting down some notes that involved the actor Peter MacNicol in his role as Dr. Larry Fleinhardt in the television show, Numb3rs. We were discussing the universe and he was telling me about a string theory-based musical that he and some others in his department were going to be putting on, and that maybe I would be interested in attending.
“We’ve worked out a lovely little sashay number,” he said, which in the dream I took to mean song more then dance.
We talked more about the vastness of space, and I asked him if our molecular structures, which seemed to not only form us, but to be in constant motion around us and within us, spinning, forming, appearing, etc., might have a tendency to be drawn into other molecular structures simply by focus. The astronomer, for example, whose passion builds because the stars pull at him as much as he pulls for the stars. That somehow we are drawn into both infinite and finite space by paying attention to it and focusing. Friendship and love, for instance, nothing more then attention to another’s details. The artist or poet, drawing their insight not somewhere from within, but rather somewhere between themselves and whatever it is they’ve chosen to focus their attention on. An artist such as Renoir, for example, saw the exact same light and subject as everyone else, yet was able to focus and draw from this environment something that others around him were not.
We walked and talked some more.
It was a good dream, although I wouldn’t have minded swapping Peter MacNicol for Navi Rawat. Now there’s a smile worth dreaming about.
On the upside, at least it wasn’t a Judd Hirsch dream. Not that I’ve ever had one. My fingers are crossed.
Three
I don’t remember much about the final dream of the night, other than books were involved again somehow. I was at a kiosk in the mall, looking over a children’s book that had a secret inside place that you could hide your teddy bear in, which I thought was kind of clever, although now that I’m awake, I’m not so sure. Would a kid want to put their teddy bear inside a book and close the cover?
Anyway, the moment my eyes popped open, the dream and the waking world collided into another of my futuristic ideas that is sure to come true. This one - the eventual union of public education with the retail sector, resulting in school classrooms that are built as part of a large shopping mall. The kids will earn credits for attending and passing classes, which they can redeem at any of the mall’s shops which are, naturally, located along the hallways that the kids pass through on their way to their next class. I even envisioned periods of history being divided up into sellable, corporate sponsorships. The Victoria’s Secret Renaissance, “bringing out the architecture in every woman” for example, or how about The Cingular Wireless Industrial Revolution.
I’m full of good ideas. It’s just a matter of time before someone starts asking for them.