A Scary Halloween Dream

Jack-o-lantern (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

       This past Sunday morning I had a very scary dream.  I dreamed that my Monday post  for my Tossing It Out blog had become infected with a virus from a website that was taking over my site with links attached to key words within my post.  I was not sure where the links would lead to and I was unwilling to click on them to find out. They seemed to appear randomly and each time I fixed one, another link appeared in its place.

      The night previous to the dream I had been finishing up "My Brain is a Blog", a satirical humor post with some serious controversy that was to be a sort of lead-in to Halloween and  my Battle of the Bands post for Friday November 1.   I had some concern as to how that post would be received since it was a rather peculiar one.  This concern was probably what caused my anxiety laden dream.   This is ironic considering that the subject matter of the blog post had to do with blogging taking over the brain of the blogger, but then again having a dream with this content might make perfect sense.  The dream may have been merely a subconscious recreation of my blog post infused with my sense of concern.

       The dream seemed very real and I was believing that what had happened in the dream was something that was actually happening to my blog.  Within the dream I pinpointed the source of the problem and decided to get rid of all of the nefarious links that had been placed by an evil program that I had tapped into the night before.  I also tried to figure out how to disable the program.  Each time I tried to fix the problem I would go back to check to see if everything was okay and at the bottom of my blog post I would see the message:

          "This blog has been infected."

      In the morning after waking and rising I went to my computer to just make sure there was not an actual problem with my blog.   All was well.   The dream seemed so real that I actually believed that what had happened in the dream was a true event.   It had all seemed so convincing.

      Thank goodness it had only been a dream.

Happy Halloween!

        Have you ever had a blog dream?    Does the intensity of a dream dilemma every carry over into the immediacy of awakening so that you have to check to see if something from the dream was true or not?   What real-life related fears enter into your dream life?   

Related articles

• Dream Expert Damian Nordmann Talks About Nightmares
• My Child Has Nightmares
• Dreams
• I Think I'm Okay Now

Wake Up, Go to Sleep, Wake Up, Go to Sleep...

Insomnia (Photo credit: schnappischnap)

          Do you ever have those crazy nights where sleep is fitful?   I can probably answer with confidence that you have.  I know I have on occasion, but fortunately those restless nights of sleep don't happen too often.

          Usually those sporadic nights of sleep are related to some sort of discomfort such as having to urinate overly frequently, sickness, hunger, or feelings of distress.   For me the wake/sleep cycles may be accompanied by dreams, but this doesn't always seem to be the case.  Or at least there are times when the dreams are not remembered if they are present.

          On the other hand there are some nights when the dreams seem to interrupt the sleep and I return to the same dream after the waking incident.  I will awaken and ponder my dream, wondering about it, trying to work it out in my mind.  I return to sleep and the dream returns.  It may happen several times throughout the night.  Sometimes it's like a vexing annoyance while at others it is a continuing saga of mystery and curiosity.

          Those kinds of nights are usually tiring.  I awaken feeling like sleeping more, but knowing that I must get up.  If there were dreams during the night that I remember they might haunt me through out the day.  These are undoubtedly dreams with messages.  But what are they telling me?

         Then again, maybe there are no messages.  Perhaps the dreams are merely reflections of mental or physical states.    Whatever they are, they can be sometimes extremely annoying.

       What causes you to have nights of fitful sleep?   Do you experience them very often?    What kinds of dreams do you usually have when you have fitful nights of dreams that you remember?

Related articles

• Sleep.
• When I'm Dreaming
• Nightmares
• Having Trouble Sleeping?
• 'Normal sleep' a mystery to some

Dreams and Morality

Morality (Photo credit: dietmut)

       Do our dreams share the same standards of morality as we have in waking life?

        This question recently came to my mind after a couple of dream sessions on two different nights

        On occasion I will have dreams of sex and infidelity.  Usually when the sex dreams have occurred I do not seem to be married in the dream or I am married to someone other than my wife in waking life so there is no sense of my being unfaithful to a spouse, although the very fact that I am married and still having this sort of dream might indicate a certain subconscious unfaithfulness.  Since I will plead innocence in these cases because of a probable lack of ability to control my subconscious activity in these dreams, I do not consider these dreams a breach of my moral beliefs other than possibly sex outside of marriage.

        However in my dreams of the morning of October 6, 2013, throughout the night I had dreams in which I found myself in tempting situations that involved sex.  I was being enticed by different women and felt some desire to become involved.  Yet my moral sense made me avoid becoming involved.  I still felt a sense of longing and felt guilty as I woke from my final dream in the sequence.

        On a different morning I dreamed that my wife and I were going to be managing a show tour for my former boss...

        We are making preparations gathering new cast members and getting the show equipment together.  At one point I am made aware that some gold jewelry is going to be delivered to me.  This jewelry is intended for the members of some women's Olympic team and I am to accept delivery when it arrives in order to give it to my boss when I see him.  

       Instead of setting the jewelry delivery aside for my boss to pick up from me, I give it to my wife to hide so we can keep it.   When our boss arrives, my wife is hiding the jewelry behind her back while I am raiding our boss's refrigerator filled with bottles of alcoholic beverages that I am trying to take for ourselves.

       Our boss plainly sees that my wife is trying to hide the boxes of jewelry.  He seems upset.  She refuses to turn them over to him saying that she doesn't have them.  I walk towards them trying to think up some kind of story (lie) about the jewelry and that's when I wake up.

        Though the sex dreams are not uncommon, I can't remember other dreams where I am obviously stealing or lying.   There have been a few dreams dealing with killing, but usually I think the act has been committed in self defense.  In these dreams about killing the morality of the situation has sometimes been a matter of concern for me.

        It seems logical that our dream morality would usually reflect our waking life morality since that morality should be so deeply imbued within our being.  There could be instances where the breaching of that morality might reflect inner desires.  Or on a deeper level the immoral acts could symbolize a feeling we might have toward the party we are acting against.  Perhaps we hold them responsible for something that has happened to us or we feel that the person limits us in some way.

        Does your dream morality ever conflict with what you would normally believe or do?   Have you ever felt sorry or guilty in regard to your dream actions?    Why do you think we might act wrongly in a dream?

Related articles

• Moral Responsibility in Dreams
• Eight Common Dreams and Their Interpretations
• Dreams
• Freudian Dream Interpretation and Psychoanalysis

Where Does Stupid Come From?

Furious rabbit (humor) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

         Perhaps I should clarify the title question.   When I ask "Where does stupid come from?" I'm not referring to dumb stupid.  You know, the stupid that is really idiotic and bad.  Things you shouldn't have done or said.  The things that can cause big problems or get you into a lot of trouble.

         The kind of stupid that I'm talking about is the weird, sometimes silly kind of stupid that makes you roll your eyes, scratch your head in wonderment, or burst out laughing.  This stupid does not come from any lack of intelligence, ignorance, or negative influence.   This is the stupid of corny jokes, nonsensical commentary, or flatout tomfoolery.  It's that thing you do and someone says, "Omigosh!  That was so stupid!"

       Fun stupid is okay as opposed to mean or cruel stupid.  Today's post is about hoky fun silly stupid.  The kind of wacko weirdness we often experience in our dreams.  You've had those dreams haven't you?  You wake up shaking your head wondering "What was that?"

        It happened to me this morning.  I woke up with the thought on my mind of where stupid comes from.  I can't even remember what my dream was.  The biggest impression that the dream made on me was that some of the things we dream about are so ridiculously outrageous that it we have to wonder where the idea ever came from.

         Since our subconscious is the source of our dreams then we probably can deduce that nonsense could be a product of our subconscious.  Jokes and humor are typically absurd representations of real life or exaggerations of everyday experiences.  The rational mind is unlikely to resort to humor as a means of expression, but rational people need a break from reality.  Humor provides one means of escapism from the daily pressures we face or the humdrum existence that we might perceive that life is doling out to us.  Sometimes we need to just get away and not be serious.  

           Keep in mind that this is my theory.  I did not research this idea to check the validity of it.   I'm not even sure that any examination of the topic has ever been done.   The entire idea of humor coming from the subconscious was just something that I woke up with because of some crazy dream I had.  It all made sense at the time when I woke up with the idea and it actually makes more sense now as I've thought about it more.

          Humor is ridiculous but it can be very useful and even necessary for good mental health.  Hmmm--sounds like earlier views I've expressed about dreams.

          Where do you think humor comes from?    Do you think I've put forth a reasonable theory?   Are your dreams so absurd and irrational (even the scary ones) that after you wake up you see the foolishness of them and maybe even laugh at what your mind saw?

Related articles

• What is wrong with me?
• Weird Experiences, Meaningless thoughts, Deja Vu
• Silly, stupid Dawn face!!
• Improbable Research: the laws of human stupidity

The Cinematic Dream

A Night at the Movies (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

         In previous posts I've looked at the topics of dreams as they relate to movies.  My two most recent posts explored the topics of dreams that remake movies that we've recently watched and dreams that are presented in a "movie" format.  This current post will discuss the dreams that are cinematic by nature, but don't come across as what we define as a movie.

         A cinematic dream is one that is one that we watch but do not act as a participant.  The dream appears as though we are watching a film or at times even directing the action.   Sometimes there may be a specific story that we watch unravel and in certain cases we may know what is going to happen almost as though we have authored the story.   Since the dream is coming from our mind I think it might be accurate to say that we are indeed the authors of these dreams.

        The dreams that are not specifically presented as movies, we might "watch" them as such and think in movie terms as though we are an audience.  We might sense that we are in an audience or we might perceive that we are alone watching the dream.  The dream can appear on some unidentifiable medium or it can be specifically seem to be on television or on a movie screen.   The dream is a passive event much like watching a film.

         These are dreams that seem conducive to dream recording.  I would like to be able to record all of my dreams in order to replay them later so I could understand them better.  The dreams that seem cinematic might be the easiest ones to watch since we would be replicating the dream experience that we had already had.  Would seeing the dreams while we were awake and of waking mind drive us mad?  Dreams are often incomprehensible enough when we  think about them.  Perhaps seeing them could be dangerous to our mental state.  If it were possible to watch our dreams I think I would want to watch them by myself.   I would definitely want to screen all my dreams before allowing anyone else to watch them.  Sometimes dreams can be mighty peculiar.

        Do you sometimes "watch" dreams rather than participate in them?   Do you think artists dream in the mediums in which they work?   Perhaps did Shakespeare dream in plays?   Verdi in operas?  Salvador Dali in surrealistic imagery?     Have you ever created something based on a dream?  Would you like to be able to record your dreams so that you could watch them while awake?

Related articles

• Dreams
• Get Out My Dreams, Get Into My App
• Salvador Dali: Surrealist Elephants
• Un Chien Andalou: Nightmares and Surrealism
• Lucid dreamers could offer an 'insight into consciousness'
• The High Wire Act of Dreaming
• Such stuff as dreams are made of...