Dreams can be freaky. Just the thought of going off
somewhere with strangers while you sleep is enough to keep anyone awake. Anyone
or anything can enter your dream life to attack or torment. Conversely, you can
do anything within a dream, be anyone you want. Wouldn’t it be
FAN-Freaky-TASTIC to just set an order for a dream about your favorite movie
star or a tropical vacation and then go to sleep knowing it would be your REM
entertainment?
Some believe you can. I tried it the other night but it kind of backfired. I was thinking about Hugh Jackman singing to me when I went to sleep but instead of dreaming of Wolverine or Van Helsing, I had a dream that I was Chuck Norris's girlfriend and he was REALLY standoffish. (I'd been tossing around Chuck Norris jokes with my daughter earlier) Maybe the trick is to think of your dreamy boyfriend earlier in the day then try to forget him so it gets pushed back to the hindbrain. Read on...
Some experts think that dreams are
nothing but your pesky hindbrain’s need for stimulation while the body has gone
to sleep. During REM (Rapid Eye Movement or Deep Sleep) messages are sent to
the front brain to keep active and those messages link up with your memories
and feelings to concoct a dream. Here’s a funny example: In a study, dreamers
who wore red colored glasses before sleep had dreams that involved the color
red. Taking this further, I’m wondering if I went to sleep with photos of Hugh
Jackman taped to my eyeballs...
If you were hoping that dreams were more mysterious, keep reading. Something truly freaky is coming. Not
everyone believes that your dream themes stem from sexual frustrations. Even
Freud. Many scientists who have analyzed dreams have no explanations or
interpretations but most agree that if you’re being chased, it probably means
you’re afraid of something in waking life.
There is a whole, huge dream dictionary online where you can
retrieve specifics but again, no one knows for sure what a dream means. Some
common themes such as public nudity, losing teeth, and flying, continue to
baffle even the best psychiatrists. I think we can all agree if you dream you
have gone to a PTA meeting stark-naked, you have repressed insecurities and
feelings of not being well liked by your peers. Can we move on to less obvious
ideas now?
Flying is supposedly linked to sexual feelings but I
disagree. I’d like to agree because I dream of flying all the time and I’m
damned good at it. An expert, in fact. 'Nuff said.
My recurring dream theme is about entering a house with
rooms, and doors, and connections to more rooms that never seem to end. Often
the top floor is haunted by something evil, the wind swirling around ominously,
spirits taunting me to climb the stairs etc. Sometimes I must rescue something
up there. Once it was my mother who’d recently died. She was a tiny owl and I
set her free out a window. But usually I avoid the top floor knowing that it is
the worst form of evil there is and the likelihood of getting out is not good.
I don’t even venture to the floor just below it in case something grabs me.
According to dream sites, the house is me, my mind, and the attic is supposed
to be my intellect. So what I get from this is: I’m afraid to be intelligent.
Is that what you got too? In real life, I am not a cerebral Rhodes scholar type
person whose thirst for knowledge drives me to distraction. I’m a people person
(I like to say, cheerfully). So maybe my hindbrain wants more and my front
brain thinks it’s a bad idea to get too smart. I don’t know.
Lucid dreams are when you know you’re dreaming within your
dream. Ever done that? I remember as early as five years old having a dream
about my kindergarten teacher throwing me down the stairs (don’t ask) and me
saying to her that it was fine that she was about to send me flying because it
was only a dream.
Then, there are things called W.I.L.D. dreams and I’m not
talking about what you might think. Wake Induced Lucid Dreams are the holy grail of lucid
dreaming. It’s a method of going from fully awake to a lucid dream of vivid
proportions. Supposedly it takes a ton of practice and very few can do it. This
is where ordering your dream might kick in nicely.
Here’s the freaky part I was telling you about. There is
such a thing as a precognitive dream where you dream something that comes true.
Now this idea is completely inexplicable in scientific terms and not well
received by anyone who tends to think logically. However, Mark Twain once had a
vivid precognitive dream showing his beloved brother in a coffin with an
arrangement of roses on his chest, only to have it come true within the month.
His brother was killed in a tugboat explosion and ended up in a coffin exactly
like the one in the dream, right down to the one red rose in the midst of all
the white roses. Charles Dickens had two supernatural experiences involving
dreams. Once, his dead father visited him in a dream and Charles awoke to find
him sitting on the edge of his bed. The second time, he dreamed of his sister
in law who’d recently died. He’d loved her in real life and had several dreams
of meeting her in his dreams. After one such dream, he awoke to see her
apparition floating in his bedroom, eventually disappearing through the room’s
ceiling. I did not know this when I wrote The Dream Jumper’s Promise but
found this very interesting. If you read my book, you’ll see why.
In that novel I take the idea of lucid dreaming and W.I.L.D.
dreaming one step further to a level where you are able to share dreams with
another person. I honestly thought I made this up but it turns out there is
such a thing as a shared dream. And it turns out there is a movie called
"Inception" about this too. When I saw the ad for that movie a few
years ago, I was angry that they’d somehow stolen my idea but I finished
editing the book and eventually published anyways. I’m glad I did because there
are many differences in how the writer of "Inception" and I approach
dream jumping. For one, my jumper doesn’t intravenously squirt anything into
his veins. He enters the dream through a psychic connection, matching his
breathing to his subject’s. Luckily Jamey Dunn (my hero) is a moral person and
would never jump into someone’s dream to swindle a Fortune 500 business man.
In The Dream Jumper’s Promise, Jamey and his former
love Tina, (who has just lost her husband) share dreams to try to find out what
happened the day the husband went surfing and never returned. I wanted to call
it a paranormal theme but there are no vampires or shape shifters. Then I
wanted to call it romantic suspense but it’s got this para aspect. Maybe
someday Amazon Kindle will have a category within paranormal called Dream
Jumping. You never know.
Obviously I find dreaming extremely fascinating. How about you? Had any strange dreams lately? Let's hear!
