What did you dream last night?

Can't remember!

I was coming into some kind of lobby ( an office? a hotel) There were two men at the counter but they were busy reading something. I went back out the door. The dream ended.

Joe(a while later I had the exact same dream)Nation

Two nights ago, I dreamed I had alot of pencils to sharpen, hundreds, and in the dream I was feeling very stressed because I knew I wouldn't have enough time to get them all sharpened- it reminded me of the woman in Rumplestiltskin who was in the situation in which she had been given the task of turning an unmanageable amount of straw into gold.

I was telling a friend about it, and he said that that's a very common dream actually, (although I've never had it before) and he said the common interpretation of it is that people who have that dream have some unresolved creativity they want/need to express.

That might make sense, although I thought it spoke more to my job - that I have what sometimes seems like the unmanageable task of helping people who have not historically been naturally academically inclined, succeed academically.
Because it also reminded me of when I used to work at the Revlon factory during winter and summer breaks in college, and I used to go home so tired, and every night my dream would always be the same, that I was standing on a line, with glass bottles of Charlie rolling by, and I couldn't grab them all fast enough to keep them from falling to the concrete floor and shattering.
To this day, if I smell any of several Revlon products, like Charlie or the old Flex shampoo - I immediately get a headache.

(Interesting thread Joe - I dream almost every night...and I usually remember them, and I love talking about them, to try to figure out what they might mean, so I hope you don't mind if I repeatedly post....)

A girl

I was standing at the bottom of a steep, curving, picturesque flight of steps in an unfamiliar hill town waiting for someone (I can't remember who) to join me.

My mood is one of resigned patience.

I had several vivid dreams last night.

I seem to dream about houses, often. There is a house that turns up in my dreams a lot that is "this" house, but it's not. I'm usually confused when I wake up about which house is mine (the one I'm in, or the one from my dream).

"My" house has a third floor/ attic that is not in the best of shape -- it's been that way for a while (through several dreams), we've been working on other things. Last night I came to the realization that if I could fashion a suitable barrier for the stairs leading up there, we could keep a cat up there. We never used that space for anything anyway, but it was big enough and with enough light and windows and stuff that a cat should be fine, and leave the rest of the house alone for allergic-to-cats E.G. Sozlet and I were very excited about the idea. E.G. was considering it. I woke up. (And almost rolled over and asked him, "So...?!")

Oh yeah, I love the dreams that make you feel like everyone involved was there and a resolution was foung only to find out later it was just YOU that resolved it in a dream... No one else knows abut it. That has confused me many times with Bear.

"But we DID decide to... Didn't we?"

Last night I had a hodge podge of disconnected dreams: Driving a golf cart, chopping wood, talking and laughing with my sister at the kitchen table over coffee, cub grocery shopping with me, and cubette saying she is going to get something... do I need anything?

All were short, no particular topic. No idea why I would chop wood. I think my mind was just having fun.

Suddenly I've become interested in sleep. (It may be because I am getting more sleep lately.) There was a long ScienceTimes article a few days ago that reported on the new research into what happens in our brains while we sleep as well as the basic question, which had never been answered, as to why we sleep? There is something going on in there, some kind of sorting out of all the information and stimuli coming in.

But it is dreams that are the most interesting phenomena, aren't they?
Where do all these people in our dreams come from? I had the best talk with a black man I have never in my (real) life met or, I think, even seen. So where does my medulla oblongata come up with this guy? And what the heck do any of the staircases, motor trips, walks on strange streets, naked people and secret suitcases have to do with our brains parsing out the world?

Joe(I still remember the details of my first nightmare.)Nation

I've been having "glimpses" more than dreams lately - they're very vivid. Last night it had something to do with making sandwiches and I was using mayonaise, something I rarely do in real life, being a mustard girl.

As long as it's not the dream where I have the long, long hair growing from my tongue I'm happy. That dream makes me crazy.

I useed to dream of flying.

I'd run, hold my arms out, flap, and take off, gliding for some time until i came back to earth.

I very rarely dream (that I remember) now.

Where's my pillow?

Joe(go redsox)Nation

It wasn't last night, but, I dreamed I saw a portrait of God. He had a black beard and wore a long garment of blue. I thought: You look at it until you die. End.

I often have organizing dreams right about the time I'm going to wake up. And it's wake up for whatever reason, such as to go to the b'room and then return and sleep another five hours.

The organizing is the same, but the circumstances change. And I often don't recall the circumstances. As I explained to RP last night (after I'd just woken up from one of these), it's like I'm in a hen house with a bunch of chickens. And it's very important -- but not aggravating or pressured -- for me to get all of the brown chickens on one side of the hen house and all the white ones on the other. It's almost a meditation, if that makes any sense.

I suspect that it's a soothing thing for my subconscious, to order the world to my liking even if my liking is something as wacky as segregating chickens. I have been doing this for decades. My mother recalls that when I was in the stroller (so I was, what, one?), there were beads on the cross bar in front. And I wasn't flipping the beads from side to side, or spinning them; I was separating them into groups of twos and then groups of threes, then fours, etc., then I'd go back to the twos once I had run out of combinations.

PS Joe -- you may very well have seen the man in your dream, but he was a face in a crowd or maybe a composite of several faces. One thing the subconscious seems to do is to not have a very good focus feature, so you end up with unimportant things (or people, or places) looming extremely large, as substitutes for what's really important to you in your waking life. Hence the man has a certain face and look (and voice) but he's probably symbolic of someone else who has a much stronger hold on you, or a combination of somebodies.

Dreams are endlessly fascinating to me and I could take about them for, well, forever or so. But first I have to sort something ....

Charles deLint has done a lot of very interesting mythic/poetic explorations of dreaming.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_de_Lint

I had no idea. What a lot of books.

===
No long dreams remembered last night. Pieces of roadway, there was a short something-- a man was wrapping something large up in paper or a plastic dropcloth. He smiled at me.

Joe(I forget who wrote that everyone and everything in your dreams is just a part of you -of course, who's brain is it anyway?- anyway.)Nation

Joe--

Double armload of books--wisdom in fiction.

Best quote read recently regarding the subject:



Joe(lie back down)Nation

I dreamed that the Boston Red Sox won the 2007 World Series.

In four games or five?


Joe(um. Tis important to my financial future.)Nation