cislyn | May. 5th, 2005

My mind is very associative. I'm constantly making connections between things - the way the sun hits a puddle will remind me of a night at the beach back in Florida and the moon on the water; a song on the radio brings to mind simultaneously many other times and circumstances I've heard it as well as images from stories I was reading while it was playing; a smell evokes a taste which brings with it sensations and a daydream about going to the moon and that reminds me of a book I read in sixth grade (what was it? "This place has no atmosphere"... something like that) and on and on and on. I've got this constant deluge of information and sensation going on in my brain, a steady stream of "do you want to think about this? what about this then? this?" that bubbles under the surface of my conscious mind.

Most of this never touches the waking layer, the bit where I actually take these connections, turn them over, play with them. But it's all going on, and at any given moment I can bring forward dozens of these little thought bubbles and do something with them. Usually I don't, of course. When I'm driving down the road and I see a street sign which reminds me of another street sign in another city where once someone pulled out and nearly sideswiped me (rush of adrenaline, pulse pound, hands shaking, whew) it's not really productive to think about it. Or the many other things which are tugging and pushing and pulling at my focus at the same time.

I think I have this quality in my mind to thank for my vivid and strange dreams. I believe that when I'm constantly making these connections throughout the day - constantly pulling up memories, linking words together in strange formations to taste their rhythym, turning over the word "rhythym" and remembering college Greek classes and the feel of the plastic seats beneath my knees, and on and on - and then dismissing them without really doing anything with them, they all go into a sort of giant heap of mental rubbish. The garbage pile of my brain, so to speak. When I'm asleep, my subconscious starts sifting through the rubbish pile, tossing out things like zombie (ooo, you saw that word yesterday somewhere), elevator, wet pavement, hands, T.S. Eliot, soap bubbles and other things that I either saw or made a connection to during the day to make the image gumbo of my dreams.

Sure, the pot gets stirred up with a stick of anxieties and emotions so that it's all flavored, but most of it doesn't mean anything. It's fascinating to me to think over my dreams and study the way my mind has put together so many of the things I didn't think I noticed or thought about the day before, how it all ends up in there. I sometimes wish for dreams that were more coherent, less random and strange (giant lobsters? Where'd that come from?)... mostly I enjoy it, though. My storyteller's instinct comes out to play at night, toying with all the links my mind threw at me during the day. And I'm lucky in that I can lucid dream, too - though it's tricky for me to get in the proper mindset to do so, and my lucid dreams are rather focused and specific.

How do you dream?