Only in Dreams

For a couple of brief occasions, I have kept a dream journal.  And no, I don't mean goals or resolutions, I mean the things that happen while you're sleeping kind.  I'd wake up, and in that fleeting time where you can still remember what your mind was playing with, jot down what I could recall.  I'd seen it done in movies and TV shows, and it always seemed that whatever dream the character had would end up being of vital importance later in the episode.  So I gave it a try.

The only trouble was, I didn't have dreams that illuminated some big quandary in my life.  As a side note, apparently dream interpretation is not considered sound psychological practice anymore, according to my psych-student sister.  But even if someone did try to examine my dreams for deeper meanings, they'd struggle as hard to find anything as a literature student reading Ulysses.  (Bam!  Take that, James Joyce!)  I distinctly remember one night where I awoke convinced that I had just had the most amazing dream ever, and I needed to write it down so I could tell Stacia about it in the morning.  I stumbled about in the dark to find a pen and paper, then scrawled down everything I could remember.  I went back to bed happy that it wouldn't be lost.  When I awoke, I grabbed the paper to see what amazing subconscious idea I'd had, only to find a nearly illegible but rather detailed summary of the film The War of the Worlds.  It was a great story, all right, it just wasn't mine.

The other issue for me is that seldom do I have one contiguous dream.  Often it's more a series of unrelated vignettes, each only lasting a few moments.  Like the dream I had last night, for example, which lead me to wake up and say to myself that it was technically impossible to have a more awesome dream.  Ever.  In fact, when I woke up and decided I'd write about the dream, the working title for the blog post was "It's all downhill from here," implying I'd never again experience such an incredible dream.  So what was it?  Two things:

First, I was feeding a sandwich to an ankylosaurus.  If you don't know what an ankylosaurus looks like, here's a picture.

Also, if you don't know what a sandwich looks like, here's a picture of that.  Though if you truly don't know what a sandwich is, you really have better things to do with your time than read my blog.

In this case it was a salami sandwich on white bread, and the ankylosaurus ate it in four little bites.  Then I got on the back of the ankylosaurus and rode around while he ran laps of the room we were in.  It was awesome.  Then I woke up.

So what's the moral of this story?  I really don't know.  I suppose when I look at this dream from my very logical cubicle, it seems silly and meaningless.  But I'm not the first person to ride a dinosaur, and who's to say that those guys didn't feed their steeds sandwiches too?  I do know that I enjoyed the hell out of that dream, and that if any bizarre set of circumstances arose that allowed me to experience it in real life, I'd be off to the deli as fast as I could go.  I guess that works for all kinds of dreams, nocturnal or otherwise.  You might think they'll never get more awesome, and once you shake off the grogginess you might realize that it wasn't as great as you thought, but you bet your ass that you'd live that dream if you could.

I may never meet an ankylosaurus, but that's not going to stop me from trying my darndest to have a sandwich ready in case I do.  I think we could all use some.