With sleep deprivation (eventually) comes a good night's sleep. With a good night's sleep comes some very realistic dreaming. These are not things that I get a lot - that is both a good night's sleep or realistic dreams - but when they do come around they are invariably interesting. Take the one that I had the other night. I'll set the scene a little below in terms of the 'real world' build up to this dream but the gist is that I was in a group of people hiding from something and I was seeking solace in an old friend - an ex to be precise. If that doesn't want to make you put down OK and Hello! and pick up your copy of Freud then I don't know what will!
So we build up to this dreaming session with something that I've only ever done once before in my life: 'pulling an all nighter' - i.e. just not going to sleep. It turns out that the body doesn't react well to going without a proper rest, nor does it like being out in the cold during the time when it would usually be resting. OK, so I knew all of this before Thursday night but it was never an issue because I don't tend to miss a minute more of sleep than I really have to. I was queuing for tickets to a big social event in the university calendar and successfully acquired said tickets before returning home on Friday morning a broken and poorer man. What made the whole 'staying up all night' thing worse was the fact that the next day (being Saturday) I was working at 6am. My body said no but the rota at work said yes - the latter is always victorious.
You get the picture that I was very tired in the period between waking up on Thursday morning and going to sleep on Friday night. I managed to get a good few hours of sleep in before slouching off to work on Saturday for a fairly standard 6 hour stint. I went to the football in the afternoon thinking that my body had magically repaired itself of the evils that I had subjected it to - I was wrong. Almost as soon as I got through the door after the football I knew that bed was required. Given the chance I could have easily slept from Saturday night right through until Sunday evening. That wasn't to be though as I set out on my weekly 10 hour Sunday shift at work.
All I've succeeded in doing so far is telling you what I've done for the last few days. If I had wanted to tell you that I would have just copied and pasted the relevant entries from my journal into this post (yes it's that boring) but that's not what this post was meant to be about. Let's roll back a stage to that sleep between Saturday and Sunday and my surprise reunion with a face from the distant past.
I can't remember the setting for the dream but I do know that I was with a group of people and that I was hiding/running from someone/another group of people - the details are vague but that's all you're getting. Then suddenly, about two or three locations in to this dream (we moved around a lot for some reason) this girl appears. We talk deeply and frankly with each other. I told her things that I would tell to very few people and she listened. To capture the way that I felt when I woke up on Sunday morning would be a feat - a moment incapable of being reduced to a bottle, as the saying doesn't go.
As I said at the start of the post (and as I've said in previous posts) I don't dream an awful lot. I wish I had a dream every night because they always throw up something for me to ponder. This dream, despite the brief treatment it receives above, was no different and I'm yet to understand what it means. I was running from something, with other people and laid my deepest thoughts out to a girl that I've not seen, let along thought of, for years. I'm not going to get all theoretical here ('the dream means that I have commitment issues' or the like) but you have to think that being able to form such stories in your head during the time when the brain is doing nothing but forming that story, must mean that there is something to be extracted from it.
I'm not sure what that thing is though and I'm actually not going to spend a lot of time thinking about it. I'm just going to take this dream as it was. I very much so enjoyed it and, at least for a few hours on Sunday morning at work, when I thought of this girl I smiled - surely that's enough to take from the experience?
Thanks for reading - here's to my next dream and my next cheap idea for a post!
Martin
