Neuralmush

Do you ever have those dreams that seriously impact you? Where you wake up and feel shaken by them? Or have them sit in the back of your mind, and every once in a while you feel the shadow of your unconscious taunting you with these emotional films of an event that never even happened? This seems to happen to me often. Most of my dreams I remember, and not all of them are this way. Usually I just spend my unconscious hours teaching my grandma how to knit a sweater for her pocket-sized narwhal, but sometimes there’s one dream, or a string of dreams, that just won't settle. Often it has to do with some vividly awful event because my brain is an asshole. 

I don't want to spend time talking about these dreams because they weren't real. My emotions, the unsettling feeling that I still have sometimes when I think about them (like my brain has unfinished business), and their often recurrence; those reactions are real.

Scientists don’t know why we sleep. There are theories, of course, ranging from sleep being a reset button on our metabolism to sleep being a way for our brain to synthesize our short term memories into long term memories. If we don’t sleep for extended period of time, our brain begins to shut down. We feel dizzy, clumsy, have tremors, and sometimes hallucinate. Sleep does something for us that carrier some serious therapeutic clout. Yet we often give up sleep first in times of stress, or sleep very little to give us more time for the demands of our lives. I’m guilty of this. Extremely guilty of this.

I think maybe that’s why my dreams are so extreme, realistic, and lingering. I don’t sleep often, and when I do, it isn’t very much. My brain seems to be exploding through the REM cycle as quickly as it can so that it can synthesize, organize, or do whatever it is that brains do. After having dreams like the one I had recently, I get obsessed with the analyses of them. I want to understand why I’ve decided to have these dreams or what happened in my life that could have cause my brain to make those connections. I’m pretty good at guessing or thinking that I have an explanation, but that doesn’t always fix the unsettling feeling or the stress that the dream may come back. When I begin to understand why we dream, why I dream, it helps me to do this. I feel cathartic about the nature of dreams, and comforted in at least thinking that I have some idea of why I dream the way I do.

-Nicole