Dreams

I have always had vivid, detailed dreams. I wake up and remember a lot of the details as if I'd been watching a movie all night. But lately, they have ramped up. I guess my current cocktail of sleep deprivation, co-sleeping due to being lazy and exhausted, and all around stressed by the circumstances of my life have led to some doozies in the past couple of weeks.

Take last night for example. Here are some scenes from my dreams:

1. I was walking on a boardwalk with a friend who used to be my co-worker. We walked by an abandoned restaurant in which the tables were still set up. At the tables were pictures of faces of coworkers, printed and stapled to stakes to resemble each of us. Apparently, the Activities Committee was working on the seating arrangements for our Christmas party and needed visual representations. I couldn't see my face and was worried about where I'd been placed.

2. I was house hunting with a fellow stamper who I haven't seen or talked to in years. I was helping her look at a house that her and her husband decided to buy. It was the exact same floorplan as our old house. I told her that Chris and I had looked at buying it when we sold our old house, but couldn't remember all the reasons that we chose not to buy it. At the time it had been 300+K, but now it was only 54K. The owners of the house had been trying to sell it for years. The husband was showing us around and then the wife showed up. They were a couple that I used to clean house for in high school - I'll call them the Where-beds as a riddle for my sister who used to help me clean. (Cleaning their house...now that is a blog post for another day...) It was interesting because when I saw the man in my dream, I instantly recognized him.

3. I was concerned about my face. I had discovered during my dream that I had some unusual growths on my face and I needed to go get them checked out. One spot was under my eye and it turned out to be cancerous. The other spot was a bit more disturbing. I had a strange shape growing out of my cheek that resembled an ear. I guess my cheek was producing another ear?

4. I was at some place that had some sort of a kitchen. There were a lot of people working to fix some type of meal and most of them were people I attended high school with. One gal was mad at me when I walked into the room since I wasn't helping. I tried to explain to her that I was planning on helping but I needed to wash up first because my arms and hands were covered in some sort of sticky goo. She didn't care and continued to rant about me, convincing one of my close friends to get mad at me too. I walked into the wash room and there were a couple of people there. One of the girls noticed some strange bugs coming out from a hole in the floor. All of a sudden, the bugs started pouring out of the hole and various places from around the kitchen, soon covering all of the food and surfaces while we all freaked out.

There are many more bits and pieces that I can see, but not really put into words. I am an analytical person that loves to pick apart the reasons behind my emotions, dreams, and thoughts. I can often trace the origins of parts of my dreams back to real life. I was a psych major in college and had to read Freud's Interpretation of Dreams for a class. I do not buy into his wacked theories, but I do believe that our dreams allow our minds to sort through information from our days, in sometimes recognizable ways and other times not.

Take the following scenes for example. Here are the bits and pieces that I can trace back:

1. I am not positive, but there seems to be a correlation. The more stressed I am, it seems the more I dream about my old jobs or old coworkers. Maybe I should track this to see if my hypothesis is correct...but then again, that would just be adding one more thing to my to-do list. Let's just pretend that I did and call my hypothesis confirmed.

2. I haven't talked to that gal in years, but a couple of days ago she requested me as a friend on facebook. I have also talked a little about real estate with another friend in the past week.

3. Yesterday I had a little bump under my eye that was either a pimple or a bug bite. I also had another little one on my cheek. Thankfully, I didn't wake up with the bump having turned into an extra ear.

4. I was reading a novel yesterday and in part of it, the main character had to clean out her cupboards because when she opened it, white moths flew out and she found that her cornmeal had been infested.

Now most of these things sound comical when you read about them, but I often feel confused, scared, or upset when I wake up from them. I can tell that my brain is really trying to sort things out based on these dreams and those I've had this past week. Some were more disturbing that I am choosing not to write down, some were fun. I can often see underlying themes in the varying scenes. Take the boardwalk for example. Also last night I was walking along a long corridor in a mall. I often have those types of geography in my vivid dreams - long passageways of some sort or another. I also see an underlying theme of insecurity in my dreams last night - from not being sure I was included at a table at the party, to being upset that the girl was mad at me in the kitchen and turning friends against me, to being worried about the ear growing on my face.

To me dreams are fascinating and just another example of God's mysterious and miraculous creation called our brain.