Dreams

Shout out to my roommate lance, who I’ve indirectly referred to on this blog without him noticing and is one of my massive readership volume of 5.  Lance and I will be participating in a fantasy draft this Saturday morning at 7:30AM, the earliest I’ve ever woken up to do almost anything, much less fantasy drafting. It will definitely interrupt my sweet dreams, which brings us to the topic of today’s session: 夢へ(yume e) or 夢(yume).

In my opinion, dreams are a way for us to escape the realistic world we live in…..we need a break after the 16 hours that we have to deal with of real life thought, aka going to work, paying bills, driving to different places, worrying about real life problems, etc., where we need dreaming to set it off. What we dream about are things that happen in an alternative reality other than our own, almost like watching a movie and getting lost in another world. The scenes in a dream seem distant and surreal because the fantasy world we dream about wants to block itself off from us and not be discovered so as to grant access without revealing how to get to the dream world without needing dreams. That’s why we see so many conceptually similar things (last night I dreamt about going to Australia, completing this large research project).

I also think dreaming could be some sort of extension of us in an alternative reality, like the Matrix if we had made a different major life decision earlier in our lives, and our dreams our bits of what we could have become (like if I hadn’t gone to USC Law school, what my life would have been like at Washington University of St. Louis, the other school I would have went to, which I constantly wonder about). This makes sense because rarely are my dreams (as I remember them, which I can’t do with a great amount of certainty) way out there like aliens or zombies or anything, they’re usually pretty realistic with the modern world and part of me, just not my life. I also wonder if dreaming is a way to prepare us for when we pass away, where these alternative realities will unite and humans go into a different sort of dimension, like the dreams as a gateway to these alternative realities.

No I am not hallucinating or using strong narcotic substances. I realize there is something called science that totally negates everything I said. But really, dreams are so vivid and bordering on reality that I can’t but think that there’s a non-zero chance that something like what I’ve described is true, especially if the “everything happens for a reason” can be believed. Why else do we spend 8 hours sleeping every night and a large proportion of that dreaming?

Next big new invention idea: how to program dreams so that we select what dream we can have for that night. I sometimes wish for this the morning before a big interview or a big dodgeball game, but not entirely certain it’s ever come true.

I also feel like a good night’s sleep necessitates having a solid dream or two. I often find myself sleepy or tired the morning following a night where I don’t’ remember dreaming.

Dream on,

Robert Yan