Arbitrary Dream

God, she looked just like this...

Every little thing that you say or do
I'm hung up
I'm hung up on you
- Hung Up, Madonna

After months of dream research, blogging, attaining feedback and hours of contemplation, the conclusion I came to is that dreams don’t mean anything. They are just random thought mutations manifesting in our uncontrolled, unconscious minds. The last two dream blogs I wrote- Weird Dream and Unnerving Dream- are ultimately doomed in their purpose of defining dreams.

All this effort…

At least I found out that “heat retention” was the main reason for slipping into REM- the deep phase of sleep where dreams occur.

However, recently a dream about someone I only met a handful of times nearly a year and a half ago is leading me to question all this, sending me round that cycle again. It is one of a few dreams she’s appeared in. It may have had something to do with the fact that the woman in this dream- Tracey- made a man out of me.

I have managed to avoid writing about sex for over a year, for numerous reasons that I don’t want to get into, seriously. But I think I have to. I’ve started so I’ll finish, as the guy in the Crème Egg advert says.

And yes, the woman I speak of changed me. In the biblical sense. I cannot stop thinking about her- whether I’m awake or not.

I have dated a barrage of women since seeing Tracey. Some have been great girls, with whom things just didn’t work out. Others have been bad matches- women blatantly incapable of raising their unplanned children properly.

Wow! Just look at that popularity meter plunge! My fan base in Oldham has just been wiped off the map. Maybe I should backspace all this…

Or not. Those who know me well will know it’s not them I refer to in the latter group. Some of them have been, and still are, fantastic mothers doing one hell of a job.

So. Back to the point- the content of your dreams are based (partly) on things you think about in your waking life. When you are asleep, these thoughts are slammed together by your unconscious, like an amateur cocktail barman inventing a new drink. And according to Macalester College in Minnesota, the act of dreaming is only ‘to keep you warm’ (Macalester.edu). In the blog Unnerving Dream, I discussed scientists’ findings that rats died of hypothermia when denied the chance to slip into REM. The content of your dream is arbitrary.

Here’s one analogy I saw while trawling the Net for research:

“An elephant in a dream can mean one thing to a zoo keeper and something quite different to a child whose favourite toy is a stuffed elephant.” (experiencefestival.com)

It is, therefore, impossible for anyone to generalise and interpret somebody else’s dream. If you don’t know what your dream is about, nobody does. It probably doesn’t mean anything.

I’m an adult. In my waking life I moved on quickly from Tracey and kept my eyes open. But nobody I have met has struck me like she did. I am more hung-up than Albert Pierrepoint’s entire clientele put together. More hung-up than the collective contents of my local Spic ’n’ Span.

Discussing this dream and its possible meanings in this candid way is giving me some concerns regarding self-image. When I first started blogging nobody really read my writing. It took a bit of pestering to get people to check out the posts on my humble MySpace page. At the time, I had no qualms: I would write blogs about anyone I wanted, describing them however I wanted, and there would be no repercussions if I defamed anyone- which would usually be myself. Now, through the power of Facebook’s Live Blog application, pretty much everyone I know is notified on my crazed musings and twisted fiction by their news feed without me nagging them to follow a link to another site. It’s alarming (albeit pleasing) how many people pay attention to it.

Because this information is so readily accessible, and people are affected by what I have written (Oldham is a small town and word has got around about the people I’ve immortalised in HTML) I have to be very careful about what I detail in the blog. It’s not wise to mindlessly criticise whomever crosses me- and I think I’ve got out of the habit of exposing every negative trait I have, in full view of everyone I know.

Or maybe I’ve just stepped back into that quagmire. Who knows? After analysis, it seems that this is one of those rare dreams with a pretty obvious meaning. But hey, life goes on.

I might as well keep in theme and end with a Patrick Bateman quote. How apropos.

“This confession has meant nothing.”
-American Psycho