Image via Wikipedia I am on a road tour with a show and arriving at a new motel. A man attempts to abduct my wife and I, but sometime during that event I kill him and hide his body.After parking the man's car in the motel lot I realize that there are some things I have left in it, but I can't go back to it since it is now evidence for a crime. Yet somehow I am able to retrieve a metal cash box in which I see many coins. Later I am putting the box in my van when some other people from the show start questioning me.
Then, we are driving. Our caravan of vehicles must cross a large bridge where we are required to have a police escort. I balance a large stack of broken down cardboard boxes on the cab of a truck that I am driving. I precariously perch myself on top of these boxes and somehow manage to start driving the truck without being in the cab. The boxes begin to shift and slide from under me falling off the truck. As I get off the truck cab to gather the boxes, I see a large semi truck approaching rapidly from behind me. It manages to avoid collision and passes. There are now many vehicles driving by and my stopped truck has become a hazard. My police escort starts becoming impatient and I quickly toss the boxes in the back of the truck.
Image via WikipediaI begin driving again but now I'm in an older model car. We are passing through an area where there seem to be many businesses. I am surprised that my car radio is picking up KFI, a Los Angeles station that I often listen to, even though I'm over a thousand miles from L.A.. I decide it must be online radio. They are playing beautiful classical music and I am surprised since it is normally a talk station. I wonder why they don't play this music on the air in L.A.
The above account does not even begin to include everything that happened in this dream, but this is as much as I can remember in any specific detail. The events of this dream happen in a motel room, in a warehouse type environment, in a performance venue, on the highway, and other places involving many different people from my past and others whom I don't recognize.
Upon awakening I begin pondering my dream and wonder how exactly the dream was constructed. Was it a very long dream with many components? I look at the clock and notice that during the dream I had only dozed for a few minutes since the last time I had been awake. Still the dream seemed to have lasted hours and over a period of more than one day.
Then a thought comes to me. Perhaps I was having many dreams occurring at once? If this were the case I wonder how does our dream mind process the information? Is it coming all at once on different mental levels? Or is the dream actually as long as it seems, but sped up with rapidly assimilated information bombarding our brains and remembered as though having occurred in real time?
Our dream perception may come in the same way as when we are awake. During consciousness we experience our environment on many levels of sensation based on all of our senses as well as the layers of memory and recall which involve literal and symbolic interpretation.
Think about this for a moment. During any period of time you are thinking and sensing many different things at once. All of the five senses (or the senses you are capable of receiving) are at work and you are aware of all of them, either consciously or subconsciously. You are cognizant of conversations and events happening around you and still may be daydreaming or thinking of something unrelated to your present surroundings at the same time the rest of this is occurring. If every single bit of information received by the brain at any one second were separated into single sensory moments, each second could conceivably have the equivalency of an hour or more worth of data if compiled in linear time.
This could be the reason that there are moments when "our life passes before our eyes". All memory is piled up at once and the mind reads and organizes the entire bank of data. The mind interprets the compilation of stacked up memories into a timeline which is easier for us to understand.
Perhaps this is the way dreams work. In a few minutes or seconds of dream time we sense many things at once, but the mind subdivides the dream events and sensations into a time perception that seems more reasonable to us upon recall.
Have you had what seemed to be long complex dreams in a very short span of real time? Have you ever stopped to concentrate on your thoughts and senses to see how many things you were aware of and performing at one time? Isn't the human brain an amazing instrument?
