my dreams, which I guess means, something abnormal was disturbing my sleep for the last two nights, but I
don't know what.
Anyway, the night before last I had a dream where me and Linda and Jim and Tom were driving around Chicago
in the Xterra looking for something. Yesterday I remembered more details about this dream but the details have
since faded.
Last night, I had a dream that I was on the Blue Line in Chicago and I was crying with my face in my hands while
thinking, "I want my Reno back, I want my Reno back". There was more to this dream also, but I again, the details
are already fading. It had something to do with us moving back to Chicago to take different jobs and me being totally
miserable living back in the city. Weird.
And I very clearly still remember another dream from last night that involved me sneaking into a DJ booth of some
goth club, where I verbally assaulted the DJ (who strangely was a tall, Americanized Indian man, who had a bad
curried-armpit odor) who quickly confessed that he can't stand the crap that he was playing either, and that he would
much rather be playing stuff like Greater Than One and Click Click, but he was just under so much pressure from the
lame ass goth crowd to play crap. In the dream we sat together and talked about music as I thumbed through his record
collection, which was very old looking and worn out (faded record sleeves, dog-eared corners, etc). The fact that this
dream was filled with so many tiny details that I acutely remember is also, very weird.
So the reason I am writing all of this is because on my way to work, I was listening to FLA's new track called
"Electric Dreams" and it got me thinking. What is the point of having dreams if we don't always remember them?
And thus, when we DO remember them, does this hold some significance or is it just because something woke
us up during the dream? If you look at life from a purely biological P.O.V., you know that every function of the
human body has a purpose. We don't grow hair for no reason and we don't run away from danger for no reason.
So, dreams, like everything else, must have a purpose. I know the human brain is constantly thinking, and so it must
continue to do so, even while we sleep, but there MUST be a reason why. Perhaps dreams are simply there to fill the
void our minds endure while we slumber. Since we shut off all of our external senses, our brains basically have no
stimuli to work with, so while we sleep, we dream, to keep our minds from getting bored. Does that make sense? I
just thought of this, and I didn't want to forget about it, so that is why I am writing about it here. Now I need to spend
my work day doing some dream research to find out if there is anyone else out there who thinks we dream for the
same reason.
EDIT: I just read this on wikipedia's dream page. This theory is similar to mine, but explained in a much more scientific way:
"Continual-activation theory
Combining Hobson's activation synthesis hypothesis with Solms's findings, the continual-activation theory
of dreaming presented by Jie Zhang proposes that dreaming is a result of brain activation and synthesis; at
the same time, dreaming and REM sleep are controlled by different brain mechanisms. Zhang hypothesizes
that the function of sleep is to process, encode and transfer the data from the temporary memory to the long-term
memory, though there is not much evidence backing up this so-called "consolidation." NREM sleep processes
the conscious-related memory (declarative memory), and REM sleep processes the unconscious related memory
(procedural memory).
Zhang assumes that during REM sleep, the unconscious part of a brain is busy processing the procedural memory;
meanwhile, the level of activation in the conscious part of the brain will descend to a very low level as the inputs from
the sensory are basically disconnected. This will trigger the "continual-activation" mechanism to generate a data
stream from the memory stores to flow through the conscious part of the brain. Zhang suggests that this
pulse-like brain activation is the inducer of each dream. He proposes that, with the involvement of the brain
associative thinking system, dreaming is, thereafter, self-maintained with the dreamer's own thinking until the
next pulse of memory insertion. This explains why dreams have both characteristics of continuity (within a dream)
and sudden changes (between two dreams)." - Interesting
Also, on the way to work today, I finally got a photo of that Suzuki I see almost every morning. I love the paint job.
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