More about this dreaming business. I really think dreams are important. The brain is an enormously mysterious electric planet, and how it sorts and problem solves is fascinating to me. I think at any given moment your brain is pulling in... I don't know... thousands?... of sensory messages: sight, sound, touch, smell, taste, and [I would argue...] energy. But you're only conscious of about 7 at a time (Which is very very very necessary. Can you imagine what would happen to you if you were conscious of all 5,689 sensory messages in the space of a second? You would be crazy. Actually, I think that's kind of what "crazy" is. The inability to filter sensory messages, in whatever form.). What does it do with the rest? What happens to your thoughts when you "lose" them? Do they evaporate and cease to exist? Of course not. Most have had the experience of trying to remember the name of someone or something, and you just can't can't can't, so you give up. And then two days later, you are mowing the grass or tying your shoe, and then BOOM, that name just pops up. The question never went anywhere; it just holed up in a study carrel in your brain and researched while you were showering and cooking dinner and having conversations and watching TV and farting in your sleep. That's the magical, layered, deep sea, asteroid field brain.
My favorite theory about dreams is that they have 3 tiers. The top tier is just the brain sorting through all the sensory images it took in that day. Both the things you were conscious of, and the things you weren't. It flips through them, sorts them, puts them into categories, rearranges your schemas, unclogs your short-term memory so it has space to store all of tomorrow's sensory messages.
The 2nd tier is where your brain sorts through your conscious thoughts. All the thoughts that sprinted through your brain that day. All the things you said to yourself or said to others. Where do those go? What questions did you ask? What conscious problems have you been trying to solve? What are you fretting about on a conscious level?
And then the murky bottom tier, my very favorite, where your repressed thoughts and worries and nasty little issues go to hang out in the dark. The answers to your most troubling questions wait, buried. But here they are. I think this is the meat. And I think what the brain does--or what God does--is use the cleverly crafted functions of all three tiers of our brains to help us answer our own questions and find our own right paths. No rules are altered to send messages. Everything is governed by its own natural laws; you just have to figure out what they are and then interpret within the parameters.
Sometimes when I go to bed, I ask a question (I think I've said this before.). I don't always know who I'm asking. And I'm not sure it's important the name I give. God? Spirit Guides? My brain? Because if nothing else, it brings the question into my conscious mind, and then I go to sleep and let my brain start sorting things out in its found-art kind of way (whether it's doing this all by itself, or God sets it to motion, or Spirit Guides are leading... I don't know.). I did that a couple of months ago and then dreamed of old dogs nudging me down dark paths and a dinosaur stomping on my house. Last night, thinking about this week of crazy dreams, I asked, "What do I need?" And I got Night 5:
Part 1: K, close friend from high school, disappeared. She just packed up and left her family, and no one knew where she was. The rest of that crew of high school friends were all a'twitter, and we couldn't agree on whether this was: a) worrisome (i.e., She left because she went bonkers, and we had to find her and get her help.); or b) awesome (i.e., K, a snappy soul who is better suited to glittery dance skirts than navy blue pant suits, I've always thought, left because she finally wriggled free of all the wrong things.). (NOTE: Dear high school friends who know who K is: please don't read too much into that. K has a lovely family, and I don't think she is stuck under all the wrong things. K likely represents something else entirely in my dream. I'm not much of a literalist even when I'm awake. End of note.)
Part 2: I'm at work, and my boss has a shower in his office. (What the hell?) I am wrapped in a towel and sitting at his desk waiting for him to leave so I can take a shower (It's remarkable to me how things like this are not strange at all while dreaming.). His desk is backed so close to the wall that there is very little room. I look down and see that I am sitting in thick layers of filth -- trash, dirt, debris. It's awful. Hideous. I am pushing it around with my foot, trying to find the floor. I see there is a vacuum next to me, so I start cleaning up the garbage. Then, I uncover some hardened dog poop. And my boss and I try to figure out how dog poop got into his office.
So apparently, I may or may not need to disappear (it might make me sadly bonkers, or it might make me wriggly), and I need to clean dog crap out of my boss's office.
Last night was Night 6. I didn't ask any questions. It's been a long week, and I was exhausted. My streak of BIZARRE DREAMs may have ended, because, the only thing I remember was less of a dream and more of one image on loop in my mind -- resizing rows and columns of spreadsheets. And that is very very real, I'm afraid.
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