Monday, June 9, 2008

Dreams

Occasionally my dreams terrify me. I seem to have a keen ability to dream about some of the most gruesome, terrifying atrocities that plague our planet. I'm not sure what a psychologist would say about the dreams I have when I'm in an African village and men with genocidal hearts storm through murdering indiscriminately..or other various forms of blood bath, all of which terrify me. I have dreamed myself into the Rwandan Genocide, Darfur, East Timor, Cambodia, Vietnam, Russia, China, etc.

Most recently my dreams have been focused around South Africa. In them I have fought off vicious groups of evil men who were intent on harming myself or my friends and family, each time I'm forced awake in fear and tears.

My purpose for recording this? To ascertain people's opinions as to why I seem to have such a horridly vivid imagination. It's an interesting phenomenon and not at all 'news worthy,' but it's my blog, yeah? :)
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5 comments:

belle la vie- Kristen Archer said...

Dani Dani Dani!! How are you? I told Becca that I wanted to say hey to you, but I wasn't invited... But, I just invited myself! :) It's good to see you! You look great! You'll have to send me a line sometime. See you!

Kristen Madson Archer

June 10, 2008 at 7:27 AM
Pawley said...

Three possible explanations:

1. I read once the dreams often have an evolutionary component to them – a component having to do with survival – specifically that the mind is (A) forming survival strategies and then (B) evaluating recent experiences against those strategies.

So, these vivid nightmares you have might be a good, but scary thing. Your mind has formulated survival strategies – things to do, and not to do, when faced with danger. Then it is running all your experiences – whether actual, or vicarious – against these strategies and evaluating, and hopefully modifying strategies to maximize, survivability.

So, rather than portending impending danger, it is a sign that you have coping plans for situations I hope I, or you never face. I don’t know whether to be happy, or to cry at this.

Ok, but maybe that is all monkey dust ;-) Then consider (2).

2. I –do- know that dreams can denote the echoes of stress. Once when driving with my Father someplace I shared a dream with him I had had, infrequently, but always recurring, for years. In my dream I was at college and I had just learned to my horror that through some vague mix-up I had failed to attend a class that I had signed up to attend, and that the final was that very hour. I was facing failure.

My Dad turned to me in surprise and said, ‘You too?!’

Although 25 years my senior, and 25 more years beyond his college experience than me, the shared pressure and stress of going to college and trying to support a family at the same time had caused us to be tormented by the same dream . . . father and son sharing a special nightmare. Bottom line: Stress can cause nightmares, even years afterwards.

But maybe that isn’t the case either . . . so there is always (3).

3. Could it be that you are slowly withdrawing from your anti-malarial meds and this is throwing you for a loop?

You are still on malarial meds full force? Well, scratch that then . . . bring on the monkey dust.

But, there you go, 1, 2, 3 . . . sorry, but I can only think up reasons for as many as I can count :-)

June 11, 2008 at 4:13 AM
-Dani said...

Dear Pawley,

I much appreciate your detailed analysis of my presumed sleep issues! I personally think it's probably a combination of all 3 explanations (although I am no longer on Malaria meds...instead they gave me a heavy dose of some drug or other that is supposed to rid my kidneys of all dormant strains of Malaria...and poof? they're gone? we'll see...). It's good to know there are other explanations than "dreams are the personification of your inner desires," what the?!

That being said, I am very interested in this phenomenon of 'monkey dust.' Sounds interesting!

:) Oh and nice work keeping Colby on his toes...

June 11, 2008 at 6:04 PM
Todd and Melissa Titensor said...

Dani,

Just wanted to let you know my email address is melissajanae@yahoo.com and my blog is tandmtitensor@blogspot.com.

Let me know how you are doing!

Melissa

June 13, 2008 at 12:40 AM
Becca Lund said...

I thought I had nightmares! Mostly mine involve being in the ocean surrounded by sharks, which is actually my deepest fear. BUT I remember one a professor stating his opinion on dreams: that throughout our concsious parts of the day, we load tons of information into our subconscious without even thinking, and it just sits there an piles up. So while we're in our deepest sleep, our brain does a little deep cleaning, and some of those subconscious thoughts come out into some crazy dream... Not that I think you sit there and think about genocide or anything like that.
He also said that our brain can't create faces in our dreams that we actually haven't seen in real life before. Interesting if it's true?

June 13, 2008 at 4:22 PM

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