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.