In His House, He Waits Dreaming

To me, dreams are interesting things. I took a course in psychology once in high school and dreams were briefly touched upon in one unit, but we never really got to explore what exactly makes up these mystifying and fantastic movies in our unconscious brains. I gained a basic grasp of a few things from that class, however, such as part of why one can remember dreams more easily at some times rather than others.


Now, my memory isn't the best, so forgive me if this isn't entirely accurate, but basically sleep is divided into several different stages. You cycle into each of the different stages, in which your brain relaxes and works less and less, until you reach a point known as REM sleep, which is short for Rapid Eye Movement. It is during this time that one begins to dream, and is identified by sudden spikes of brain activity. If a normal night's sleep is to take it's fullest course, one is steadily eased out of sleep by going in reverse through each of the stages of sleep, until you are once again awake.

However, most people aren't allowed the luxury of sleeping until they naturally wake up on any form of a regular basis. People have to get up and go to work or school or what have you. Once again, if I remember correctly, it is when one is awoken from REM sleep or one of the nearby stages of sleep that the person remembers the most of their dream. I would fact check this shit but this is really more of an exercise in getting into a habit of writing than anything, so I'm just going to write this anyways and damn the facts to all hell. I'm getting to the good part soon enough anyways.

Factual and scientific shit aside, it's the actual ongoings in dreams that fascinate me the most; why people dream what they do. I have fucked up dreams, and I mean that in the most, well, I don't know what kind of way but let me tell you they are weird. For example, I dreamt three times last night, mostly because it was really really warm in my bed despite it being really really cold at night; I blame the additional 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit or so of body heat occupying the same space. I would wake up from one dream, mentally sputter out a "What is this I don't even," roll over, and fitfully fall back asleep. One dream involved me somehow becoming a bike, and another featured me bouncing an egg back and forth with a friend as if it were a bouncy ball, only for it to hatch into my very own duck pet friend oh yay, and yet another dream featured my house falling down somehow, so my father built an extension onto it...on the same side of the house that was falling over. It worked somehow. And these are relatively tame dreams in comparison to what I normally dream of...such as what I dreamt of earlier today, when I woke up and then fell back asleep about an hour later. I like to sleep a lot by the way.

Though I won't go into full detail about what happened, the dream basically comprised of a war between me and my forces of people and animals against the evil armies of something or rather robots. I don't know, I think they looked sorta like a mix between the ghouls in WoW and some sort small rabid animal, like a beaver or a squirrel, only it was like five or six feet tall. Oh yeah, and I was Jimmy Neutron, only not an idiot despite my genius capabilities.

So yeah. With dreams like these, it's hard not to wonder why exactly my sleeping mind is so fucked up. People talk of having recurring dreams of falling or being chased by something or flying. I fight Godzilla in a soccer tournament and throw porcupines at houses in an act of arson or something and then escape into a hole the porcupine dug into the ground. And don't even get me started on lucid dreams; I've wanted to have one of those for the longest time. Though considering what my dreams normally involve, I doubt there'd ever be a situation where I'd be like "Hey, I must be dreaming!" and then be able to control the dream. I buy into the weirdest shit too easily I guess.