You are what you... watch

So I decided to buy The Mind at Night because I enjoyed reading it so much and my sisters got me Amazon gift cards for Christmas (thanks Amy and Erika). I started browsing this morning and read that sometimes our brain shows us plot-less imagery as a way of storing information in long term memory. I remembered reading that dreams are one way our brain stores such memory. Then I remembered the dreams I've been having lately. I had one dream where I was Harry Potter, one where it seemed I was watching an episode of Law and Order and one where I was making baseball jerseys.

All of these dreams relate back to something I have watched lately, including a 2.5 hour documentary on baseball. In the past 8 months I have been underemployed as I like to put it. I can't remember the last time I worked 40 hours in a week. With this time off I've watched a lot of TV and movies. Not the most productive use of my time. If my dreams are an indication of what is being stored in my long term memory I think that's kind of sad. I don't need stored memory of Olivia Benson interrogating a suspect or Harry Potter destroying horcruxes. Time to be more productive.

And now he's stuck in my brain

Running late

This dream was from a month back, but I just read it again and thought it was pretty cool.

And I haven't even watched Teen Wolf since this summer

I was a second-string player on a high school basketball team where a tall guy I worked with 2 years ago (David) was the star player. There was one other really good player on the team that I was the backup to. We were having a team meeting before a game and someone brought up that the kid I backed up was a werewolf so he wouldn't be allowed to play. I didn't say anything, but I knew I'd get a lot more playing time.

I left the meeting to walk over to the game. I met Abby on the way and started over there together holding hands. We were walking on some college campus and I was telling her that I'd get to play a lot more because the other kid wouldn't be allowed to play. Abby saw one of the girls she had met in China and stopped to talk to her. Then they saw another of their friends and they all started catching up. I noticed that I was wearing running shoes instead of basketball shoes so I had to go back to get my shoes. I wanted Abby to come with me, but she wanted to stay and talk. I gave her a look like I was upset with her and she shot back the same look so I went off by myself.

I started down an escalator that a couple people were trying to run up. The escalator dropped off about 10 feet at the bottom so I had to climb down the side of a hotel / casino hanging onto its sign. I went into the hotel and ran around trying to find something. I think I was looking for my room. I found a room with a fridge and opened it up putting my head in the vegetable crisper. I expected it to transport me to my room. I tried this a couple times even though the crisper was not clean.

I walked outside and someone met me and we went back in time together. We went to his house to watch a movie. I thought the movie was going to be good, but it turned out boring. David was there so I left with him to go to the game. We were walking through my parents' neighborhood and I was trying to get to their house because I still needed my shoes. The street they live on was gone, though. David left me to go to the game. The dream ended with me running around looking for my parents' house.

In the middle of the night

Great early '90's mullet

Lately my dreams have been very similar to what happens the previous day. For instance, one night this week after Abby cut my hair I had a dream that she only cut the top of my hair leaving a mullet. The next day I went into work terrified someone would notice that my hair was out of regulations.

This last week I was "camping" with the Air Force. They wanted to simulate a deployed environment so they took us out to the woods of Alabama for 4 days. There were about 25 of us sleeping on cots in the same tent at night and one night I woke up and a couple people were talking and I somehow thought there was someone in the tent that wasn't supposed to be there.

Its funny how in the middle of the night your brain will believe just about anything. Or maybe its just me. I had little evidence that would lead me to believe that there was anyone there that shouldn't have been there, but I convinced myself that someone had sneaked in and every noise was that person walking around the tent.

When I finally got back to sleep (thank you cold night and hard cot) my brain continued with its fabrication. I had a very vivid nightmare that someone was kneeling next to my cot and pulling my wrists down below the cot. I tried to scream, but nothing came out. I woke up rather shaken up. Then I found the zipper on my extremely warm sleeping bag and zipped it up so only my nose and mouth were showing and went back to sleep.

But hey, who knows, maybe it wasn't a dream after all.

Don't Panic!

Tyler Carr and I were being held captive somewhere when his brother Bryce (birthday shout-out!) came and freed us. He drove us back to my parents' house in a van. We spent most of the rest of the dream getting packed and ready. It turns out Shredder (of Ninja Turtles fame) was the one that had been holding us and he was coming to take us away. The whole dream I remember trying to decide if we were going to go with Shredder or fight back. We packed so we would be ready to leave with him if we had to.

Tyler called the embassy to tell them that a person that had gone missing was dead and we knew this because we had seen that person while we were being held at Shredder's. I got mad at Tyler because Shredder had a spy at the embassy so he probably knew that we were at my parents' house now. We hurried to get ready and my dad calmly helped.

When we heard a knock at the door Tyler and I panicked. We decided to fight back instead of go with him. I grabbed a baseball bat and gave another to Tyler. Tyler ran to the door as my dad opened it. A lady walked through the door and started introducing Shredder as he shoved her out of the way. I was standing about 20 feet down the hall when I saw him walk in. Then I reached into my pocket with my right hand and grabbed a pistol and shot him. That's when the dream ended.

Ever notice how you can be in a total panic in your dream, but others seem so calm? Like if you think you're about to die or you're not wearing any clothes the people around you in the dream act as if its no big deal. That seems to be pretty common in my dreams.

Oh, and I promise I have not been watching Ninja Turtles lately. But now I want to.

Law and Order

Dun dun (you know, the music at the beginning of the episode).

In my opinion Ice-T stands above the rest

Abby and I were at a lake house. She was hanging out with this, like, wives club and all the other wives were kinda weird, like from a bad TV show. I walked into a room where there were 2 cops talking to a girl in the middle of the room. They were investigating some kind of crime and yes it was Detective Stabler and Ice-T (honestly he deserves some sort of best actor award) from Law and Order: SVU. To complete the scene the back wall of the room was lined with people dressed head to toe in black, kinda like ninjas.

Ice-T pulled each "ninja" into the center of the room and they each did some sort of dance that was supposed to help us solve the crime. After they did their dance they took off their mask so we could see their faces. Then Detective Stabler left the room and I was freaking out that I wouldn't be able to keep everyone in the room. I held a broom in front of the door to keep everyone in. Then some lady came up to me and said I couldn't legally hold them there and everyone left.

The scene cut to me walking around the house at night. The suspects ("ninjas") started following me around real creepy like. It was like a zombie movie where everyone is chasing you in slow-mo. They all had pieces of evidence. I started following a lady carrying rocks. She set them down next to the house and when I went to pick them up all the suspects started coming at me. I started to run away. I had to hit some of them with the rocks to get through the crowd. I ran inside still holding the rocks and everyone coming after me. That's when I woke up (stupid alarm).

I'll start my attempt at interpreting by noting that I watched like 5 hours of Law and Order: SVU with Abby yesterday. No surprise where the detectives came from, then. Usually in every episode they try to hold some suspect as long as they can and some lawyer tells them that's illegal, so that explains that part. Next, I swear every episode takes place at night.

Yes we would like some candy...

Mobs surrounding me seem to pop up more frequently as of late. I'm not sure if being chased necessarily has a meaning or if its just the brain's way of creating a situation that makes me anxious. I have read that the part of the brain that makes you anxious or scared works more at night which explains why a lot of people say they have dreams of being chased. I found a dream dictionary online. Let's see what it says.

This (being chased) can represent a feeling or fear of: persecution, hostility, aggression, criticism, etc. by another person or by "people in general." It can also represent real-life situation where you feel your boundaries have been crossed or your integrity has been compromised.

Being victimized by a gang or mob can mean you're feeling overwhelmed or taken advantage of by a particular situation in your life, or you are feeling powerless.

I don't really agree with dream dictionaries. I don't think you can put one definition to every little thing you encounter in a dream. What do you think?

Lucid dreaming

I had my first experience with lucid dreaming this week. Lucid dreaming is where you are dreaming and you know you are dreaming so you have some control over the dream. There are entire books on how to be able to dream lucidly. I remember as a kid my friend would tell me that he did it a lot. I have wanted to for a long time. How cool would it be to fly? Unfortunately, I wouldn't say my first experience was entirely successful.

In my dream I was playing baseball. A player on the other team slid into home plate and the umpire called him out. The player argued with the ump and the decision was reversed. I started arguing with the ump because he's not supposed to just reverse his call when a player whines. My temper rose and I started kicking things and throwing equipment all over the baseball diamond. A couple guys on the other team tried to get me to stop, but I refused. More and more people surrounded me.

Straight out of the Ninja Turtles movie

Towards the end there were 4 guys standing in front of me holding baseball bats and looking like they were going to hit me with them. I really wanted to get past them. I wasn't afraid of them I was just frustrated that they were blocking my way. All of a sudden I realized I was dreaming and decided to just run past them because they wouldn't be able to hurt me. As I past the ball players one of the hit me in the back of the head with his bat and I blacked out. Blacking out changed the dream and I don't remember what the second dream was about. I should've remembered to fly.

Huh?

K, try to follow this one.

I was at church and this old couple and their 50 year old daughter got up to announce they were going to the temple for the first time. Although we were in Alabama they said they would be going to the temple in England. The next thing I know we were in England taking a tour of the temple grounds.

During the tour I was bored so I was doing my own thing. Oddly enough I was throwing a cucumber like a baseball and trying to get it to curve. The 50 year old daughter got mad at me for not being serious so I sulked off. I found a big walking stick at a gift shop and I bought it for $44.

I was looking at a map on a table and set the stick down when a little kid came up and started looking at my stick. He tried to grab it from me, but I pulled it back. He told me it was the same staff from the Indiana Jones movie (Raiders of the Lost Ark) that points to where the ark is located. We run off to try to figure out how to work it.

We get to a place where there are a lot of Russian army personnel going into the temple. They tell us the Nazis are coming and we need to hide. We go down near an ocean to hide. The hill we were on moves steeply down to the ocean and the ground gives way when we step down. As the waves lap against the hillside I hear a plane fly by overhead and I'm terrified the Nazis will find us.

Scared? Don't worry, he wants to help.

I get closer to the water and a wave pulls me out. I try to swim back to shore, but I get pulled out farther. I see a tree that is attached to the shore under water. I try to reach it to pull myself back to shore, but I can't quite get to it. Then I see a big brown bear swimming in the water. He offers his paw to help me back to shore. I hesitate then realize that I'm about to drown so I grab his paw and he pulls me to the tree.

The bear pulls me back to shore and I am still holding onto the staff. The dream ends with me trying to convince a team of people I'm with to let the bear fight with us against the Nazis.

Confused? You aren't the only one.

Bejeweled

Lately I have been having a difficult time remembering my dreams since Abby and I have been here in Alabama (I've come to terms with the fact that I do dream even when I don't remember the dreams in the morning). I think its a combination of a hard bed, new surroundings, and the fact that I'm constantly trying to think if I have something to do for my training the next day.

I have a game on my phone called Bejeweled. Its a lot of fun. You have to move the gems so there's 3 in a row so they disappear. Its quite addicting. Last night I played for almost an hour (I know that Abby loves to watch World Series of Poker, but its really not my thing). While I don't remember much that went on during my dream last night I do remember that there were lots of these little gems floating around and I was trying to move them into 3's. Funny how the brain works.

And the winner is...

So last week I had a dream that I was playing tennis with a friend of mine and I was down 1-5 in the set. He was acting pretty arrogant when I decided that I wanted to beat him. Then he turned into Raphael Nadal. I won a couple of games, but lost the set. We kept playing and even though I didn't win I did pretty well for playing against Raphael Nadal.

That was a super cool dream. Then last night I didn't sleep well because I'm sick and I'm on a hard bed here in this hotel room in Alabama. I do, however, remember waking up thinking that I was going to magic school like in Harry Potter instead of going to military training. I woke up thinking, "What if I can't do magic?" I guess that's what I get for listening to the 7th Harry Potter book on the 16 hour drive from Texas to Alabama.

I had a dream about you...

Here's a funny dream from last night.

I was at a choir concert with Abby. There were also some people from my junior high there. Abby got up to sing with an all girls choir. She kept looking at me like I was distracting her. I was sitting all the way in the back row. Then she had to sing a solo and must have done something wrong because another girl took the mic when Abby was done and explained to everyone that she sang it wrong. Abby didn't seem to care and just kept staring at me. She went back to stand with the choir, but they didn't sing anything.

After a while Abby took the mic again and said she was supposed to sing a duet (at which point I was terrified she was going to ask me to sing with her) but she had forgotten the music. She told the audience that she was distracted because she kept thinking about how she was going to marry me soon. Everyone stood up and turned around to look at me. While she was telling everyone this she made some jokes that made people laugh. I got the feeling that other guys thought she was funny and wanted to ask her out, but they couldn't because she was engaged to me.

Has nothing to do with this blog, yet it is awesome

What makes certain people appear in dreams? Abby is in the majority of my dreams and that makes sense to me. Next would be my immediate family and some of my best friends, i.e. Spencer, Brett, Matt, Tyler and Bryce. Spencer, Brett and Matt often show up in my dreams as I remember them from high school and not like they are now. Its weird though when someone I haven't thought of in years and never really talked to when I did know them shows up in my dream. I guess your brain needs to create a background for what's going on. And then my sister-in-law Annie has been in a couple, but always as someone else. Like its a different person, but I know that its Annie. Weird, huh?

A side of applesauce

I feel like I haven't been having interesting dreams lately. None that I really wanted to write down and certainly none that I've wanted to blog about. But today is a very rainy day so we are staying inside all day and I took a look in my dream journal to find an interesting dream to blog about. Here's what I came up with.

This is a dream that I had back at the beginning of my recording dreams. I had this after my professor told us that dreams hold deep meaning and this dream was so weird I couldn't believe that he was trying to tell me it held some sort of meaning.

Now imagine a sled full of this stuff

I was some sort of ruler in a place similar to what you would find in a Chronicles of Narnia movie. I disagreed with how the king and queen were ruling, though. I learned that to show your displeasure with the king and queen you throw applesauce on their son, so I got a plastic toboggan/sled full of applesauce and started throwing it on their 5-year-old son. This really upset the young prince and he started to cry. Then the dream ended.

A short dream, but nonetheless interesting.

Dracula dreams

Wait, so the title doesn't mean that the character Dracula has dreams, just that I was dreaming about Dracula. Well, maybe Dracula does dream, but that's not what this blog is about. I don't know.

I had been reading the book Dracula and a lot of my dreams were about vampires, which just goes to show that a lot of what you dream about at night is simply what has been going through your mind during the day.

I was sent to Russia on an assignment to find a vampire there. I really didn't want to go. During the dream as I was in Russia I did not know what I was there looking for. When I came back everyone at work was asking me what I saw there. I was answering their questions with very little enthusiasm still unaware that I had been sent to look for a vampire.

Someone else from my work had gone to Russia after me and he started talking to me about how he thought it was very obvious that there was a vampire there. We saw similar things that would denote a vampire present (according to the book Dracula). When I realized that he was saying a vampire had been there I was embarrassed that I had not put the clues together. I became very enthusiastic about recalling what I had seen in an effort to hide the fact that I hadn't realized what I had been looking for. My colleague told me about how the vampire attacked a man there and that man disappeared.

The dream cut to a scene of me and my mom going out to dinner. We were eating outside under a large tent and it was raining. A smoke cloud emerged from the forest near the tent and the vampire came out of the cloud. All of a sudden my colleague from earlier was there and we chased the vampire away. This is when the dream ended.

There are a couple things I would like to note about this dream. It came about because I had been reading Dracula NOT Twilight. Also, looking back on it I think its kind of odd because I am usually the one being chased in my dreams not the one doing the chasing.

I didn't do it?

I had this dream on Monday night.

The dream starts out with me, Abby and another guy hiking in the hills. The 3rd guy was familiar to me in the dream, but I didn't recognize his face. The next thing I remember was a rock hit this kid in the back of the neck and knocked him out. I may have thrown the rock, and I spent the whole dream trying to figure out if I really did or not.

Abby and I both freaked out and I carried him to my parents house. I thought he was dead and I remember trying to feel for a pulse, but there was nothing there. He also wasn't breathing. We took him upstairs in my parents house. The house looked like a big donut with just one round room and the stairs in the middle of the room.

Upstairs I called for help, but I didn't call 911. The people I got ahold of were very unhelpful. For a while it seemed like they just wanted to calm me down, but I got more and more frustrated as they wouldn't send anyone over to help. At one point I yelled, "Just send..." but the lady on the other line interrupted me and said, "What? a shovel so you can bury him? It'll be 30 min before we can get an ambulance there." At this point my jaw dropped and I went downstairs to tell everyone what happened.

My mom was downstairs putting dishes into the dishwasher. She didn't seemed surprised by what I was telling her. Then Abby came downstairs and told me to come back up. The kid was alive and pretty groggy. He asked what happened and I told him that he got hit in the back of the neck with a rock. I didn't tell him I threw it although I was still unsure if I had thrown it. I felt really sorry. We went to a party at someone else's house and the whole time I wanted to tell him that I was the one that threw the rock, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. That is when I remember the dream ending.

Turtle Power!

 I think this dream well depicts the fact that every dream doesn't necessarily hold some deep meaning about a person's inner most desires as Freud would have us believe. 


I found myself in an old house in a dark neighborhood. Then the Ninja Turtles showed up. They were, of course, fighting Shredder. My dad was also at the house and he was giving me advice on techniques to fight along side the Ninja Turtles. The house was one of those old houses from movies that has a lot of antiques and I went upstairs to find the 3rd Ninja Turtles movie because my dad said it would help me and the Ninja Turtles beat Shredder (yes the 3rd movie where they go back in time to Japan and no I do not like it). Not like watching would give us some insight, but that the actual movie held special powers. 

Cowabunga!

I was looking for the movie for a while when Leonardo showed up with the movie. I knew that he had gone over to Shredder's side and was now a "bad guy". I love how sometimes in dreams you just know something that seems kind of ridiculous. No one has to say that it happened, you just know it.


Leonardo had put on a red headband to try to make everyone think that it was Raphael, not he that had switched sides. He escaped the house with Shredder (another great thing about dreams is that people just show up and you don't question it) and on their way out they opened a trans dimensional vortex right in the roof of the house and evil creatures started to come out. 

Aligned with the remaining three turtles we took on the creatures. The one I remember coming out was a mechanical rhino that we grabbed by the horn and threw out the window with some ease. The whole time we were fighting the Ninja Turtles were making corny jokes just like in the cartoons from the 80's and, feeling like I was one of them I joined in the humor (sadly I don't remember any of these jokes, but I am sure they are priceless). We then went chasing after Shredder. The dream ended with us running through a shopping mall being chased by the creatures that came out of the vortex.


This is one of my favorite dreams that incorporates many typical aspects of a dream: People appearing from nowhere, being relocated as the plot of the dream continues, being chased, and me just knowing something even though it wasn't ever voiced.


Why did I have this dream? I probably watched Ninja Turtles in the days preceding it or had been thinking about the turtles that Abby and I have as pets.

Dreams

In my last semester of college I took the capstone class for my Russian major and the professor that was leading the class decided that since it was the culmination of our undergraduate careers we should take on a meaningful project instead of just regurgitating research onto a paper that we will forget later (although looking back at college, I think that type of research is a pretty good sum-up of my experience). He wanted us to learn something about ourselves. In this class we discussed dreams a lot, particularly about how through dreams you can learn more about yourself. Although I was skeptical, I took his advice and started to record my dreams. The outcome was humorous as well as intriguing. I believe I can now say that I think dreams can tell a person a lot about himself/herself.

Also, lately I have been reading a book called The Mind At Night: The New Science of How and Why We Dream. I really enjoy it because it doesn't try to tell the reader how to interpret his/her dreams. Instead it shows research that has been done in neuroscience and how the brain works when we are asleep. It has rekindled my interest in dreams, especially my own. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who was even slightly interested in dreams and how they work.

All in all, I am starting this blog because my wife, Abby, wanted me to have a blog. She gave me the idea that I could blog about dreams that I have had and it would be interesting and fun. So, in order to appease my wife and satisfy my own curiosity I am starting a blog.

A quick disclaimer: I'm not looking for anyone's advice as to the interpretation of my dreams. I believe that the interpretation of dreams is something very personal and is something each person should do for himself/herself. You have to be able to look at what's happening in your daily life to understand much of what is happening in your dream, and unlike Freud I don't believe that all of your dreams represent your deep unfulfilled desires.

So my following posts will contain content of my dreams, the ones I can remember. Although, I have noticed that the more conscious I am about recording dreams the more dreams I tend to remember. I won't post all of them here because I think that some are too personal for everyone to read. I hope that the readers of my blog will find it interesting in some way.