Dreams

Thursday, November 20th, 2008

I am talking about the ones you have in your sleep. Maybe, I have been lucky but mine are generally good and are in colour. I was surprised to learn some time ago that many people only dream in black & white. The other day, some barmy psychologist suggested that if you were raised on B & W television, then you'd dream in B & W. Bit daft, I thought, given that most of your life is in colour.

Freud seemed to think that most dreams were about sex, explicit or implicit. Can you honestly trust a man who had a phobia about ferns? All I can say is that I wish more of my dreams had some exciting sex in them but they don't. Don't think I have ever had a 'wet dream'.

No, my take on dreams is very simple and it may not apply to the rest of you. I think that when I sleep, my brain files the events of the day. Simple job for the big things but then I think it gets confused on little things and mulls them over - hence a dream in which the brain speculates and turns things over. They have to be really trivial subjects like a thought that wandered through your head at 11.03 or catching your elbow on the door frame @ 13.45.

I very rarely have bad dreams and if I do, they are usually things like missing a flight. The worst dream I ever had was to dream that I had got out of bed, made the coffee, washed, shaved and had a shower and then to wake up and find I had to do the whole thing all over again. But then my mom always said that if you tell people about a dream, you'll never have it again. She was right: it really works. So I guess you created a file for it and the brain does not have to worry again.

When I was a kid, I sometimes dreamt about being able to fly, soaring over the town with my arms spread but then I told someone about it and that was it.

And then there are the best dreams of all, the ones that you can control. They seem to come when you are hovering on the brink of waking up but the dream is good so you don't want to. Then you can adjust it. It doesn't last long but it's good when it happens.

Dream on.