In Dreams

Searching online, I couldn't find a study that tried to figure out how many people remember their dreams versus how many people don't.  My sister Karin, for example, tells me she never remembers her dreams.  My wife rarely does.  The check-out person at Sprouts told me...  Well, I didn't ask him.  He was too busy doing that thing where he pretends he really likes what I bought.  I think that's weird & very off-putting.  It doesn't reinforce my shopping behavior one bit.  Stop that!

As for me, I remember many of my dreams, & usually wake confused that I'm no longer in the dream or disappointed it's ended.  Sometimes I can even return to my dream once I've been awakened.  Here's something interesting: According to this article, "People who remember their dreams more often are more likely to wake up during the night. The processes that store memories are generally 'turned off' during sleep. Waking up after a dream would allow the brain to encode it into memory."

That's interesting to me because I am a pretty light sleeper, if I haven't overindulged in whiskey the night before.  (Though I still remember dreams when I have had a drink or two.)  (In fact, if I've only had a drink or two, enough to get a little buzzed, my dreams are more intense.)  Last night, for example, my dog Winston woke me about two hours after I fell asleep to let him out.  He does this by sitting up & whining.  He knows either me or the wife will wake up, he doesn't care who.  The way my wife sleeps, I know I would've been the one to always get up when the baby cried if we had had kids.  Anyway, maybe because of this, I remember a few of my dreams last night.  They were exciting!

There's a part of me that thinks I've dreamt like this my entire life.  I remember telling friends about a particularly vivid dream I had in twelfth grade.  It affected me then as dreams do now.  & I fucking love to dream.  I hardly ever have nightmares, unless somehow replicating similar frustrations I experience in real life is nightmarish.  But since I've never really believed in supernatural things, I don't dream in supernatural subjects, although sometimes superheroes show up.  Like they do.

Which reminds me: when I used to do acid, many moons ago (it's been two decades now), I never had those religious experiences that people claim to have, whether it's seeing their deity of choice or experiencing a oneness with the universe or really anything supernatural that the experience might confirm for you, like telepathy.  I guess I knew that there was a drug fucking with my brain & nothing I was experiencing was unnatural in any way.

But I was listening to a podcast recently (I'm tying these threads back together now) discussing Michael Pollan's new book & he points out that we remember our acid experiences far better than we do our dreams, & I wondered out loud to the podcast that maybe it's because we have those experiences while awake.  (The podcast did not give a shit about my insight.)

Ha ha, you thought I was going to talk about a particular dream, didn't you?  Nope.  It's no longer allowed on this blog.