Dreams

So I slept 12 hours last night. I came home, ate a giant dinner (see yesterday's post on lack of will power, blown diet, et nauseating cetera) and lay down at about 7:00 to nap for an hour or so. Yes, an hour long nap that lasted until about 11:30, at which point my son woke me up to tell me he was going to bed. It seemed relatively futile to get up then, so I went back to sleep and dreamt like crazy for the rest of the night. I think my brain gets bored after about 6 hours of sleep and starts making dreams - the kind of dreams that are insanely real and vivid but just a little. . .off.

(Note: If you are not a mefite, the following will make no sense to you whatsoever. Feel free to proceed to the following paragraph. We apologize for any inconvenience and will return you to your regularly scheduled program shortly. This has been a public service announcement.) I also have clearly been spending WAY too much time online, because I had another anxiety producing shame filled Metafilter dream and it wasn't even a weirdly entertaining one - unlike the one I had where Mathowie yelled at me at a meetup for being stupid - but instead I dreamt that I made a bad post (a weird little graphic puzzle and I invited everyone to solve it; it was very chatty and took up half the page with ascii art) to Metatalk and it got deleted and then I couldn't post again for two weeks and I was all stricken with embarrassment and anxiety, particularly since I had a vitally important Askme question right then. When I woke up I thought it was real and I approached Meta nervously, but fortunately I had not in actual fact posted this puzzle.

Sometimes I do remember dreams as real and, probably, vice versa. It's not that I can't tell the difference (okay, maybe it is) between dreams and reality, because I can while I'm in them, or sort of, but it's the memory of dreams that gets mixed up with the memory of reality. Do you know how when you're dreaming you will have memories that are actually simply dream memories? They usually seem designed to give you a sort of dream logical explanation for something, as in, "Oh YES I do remember now, I planned to have the floor of this room in the castle turned to raspberry jello, of course." Then, months later, you may sort of stumble across this memory in your brain and for a second you're not sure if it's real or not. Once I told a friend of mine that the brakes on my old van were bad, because I had to pump them a lot to get them to work at all. A couple of days later I realized that that wasn't true - it was a dream memory or a memory of a dream and, to make it all even more unsettling, as I remember this conversation now, I'm not entirely sure that it ever took place: it may in fact be a dream memory of a dream memory of a dream memory.

The other part of my dream last night involved looking for a house with two brothers, one very good looking, the other not so much. We were somewhere in Pennsylvania where the houses were small and close to each other and I rescued a Vietnamese toddler from an oncoming tractor trailer, but her mother and all the other Vietnamese women who watched me do this were silent and watchful instead of thanking me. I went back over to my side of the street feeling oddly guilty and then the brothers and I went to eat Indian food on the second floor of a rowhouse. I had never heard of anything on the menu before but I didn't want to let anyone know that I was so unsophisticated so I kept reading it over and over, hoping vainly to come across something vaguely familiar. With a dream like that, it's unlikely that I'll remember rescuing a toddler as real - but I'm thoroughly capable of being in an Indian restaurant some time in the future, looking at the menu and feeling relieved that I know what to order, unlike that other restaurant, where was that place? It was located at the intersection, I guess - the corner of Dream and Reality.