SlipLive

so i had a thought this morning about dreams. tell me what y'all
think, if you feel like getting a little deep this monday afternoon.

I dream in specifics. My dreams can consist of detailed songs, lyrics
verse, language, poems, speeches or random visual details. People can
talk in foreign languages that I somehow understand (i guess cause
it's my dream). Those images and recollections must be in my brain
somewhere, but are they only recallable while I'm dreaming, or can
they be summoned any time?

Does someone with a photographic memory have the ability to recall
those things all the time?

A lot of my dreams have background music. The music can be a random
song I've only heard a few times, but the song will seem like it is
perfectly played in my dream. It's strange that I could remember the
lyrics to a song I've only heard a few times. You think that has
anything to do with the "people only use 10 percent of their brains,"
thing? Maybe when we're sleeping, we use other parts of our brain that
normally aren't asked to work.

I just watched a movie today directed by Michel Gondry called The Science of Sleep, in which the main character has trouble at all times figuring out if he is asleep or awake.

My dreams often tend to be vivid with music and language. I had a dream the other night in which I was playing music with someone else...music that I am convinced that I could hear perfectly clearly in my dream but I did not recognize it as anything I had heard before.

Was I composing something while asleep? It's hard to say. I certainly didn't remember the tune after I woke up. I suppose it is possible that there is some part of the brain that can be stimulated which gives the experience of composing or playing or listen to music, without any actual notes to accompany the experience...but at the same time I remember playing individual notes on a piano in my dream, which spanned over time...in other words...actual music.

Dreams are such elusive things that we each have every time we lay down to sleep, but we can't seem to put a finger on why or how. I often convince myself, while dreaming, that I am awake. (Usually feeling anxiety over doing or saying something really stupid and 'realizing' that I would have to pay the consequences.) That being said, I am completely convinced that I am awake right now, and not just dreaming that I am typing at a computer. The inter-subjectivity of our world seems to reinforce my belief that I am awake. (someone beside me could assure me that I am indeed sitting at a computer right now)

But there is something about dreams (at least some of them) which makes them seem just as real as wakefulness. I find that emotions are quirky things that always seem 'real' while dreaming. I had this crazy dream over a year ago that I still remember vivdly in which I was driving a car (or some kind of automobile) through a giant glacier in dense traffic. It seemed like an ancient mass migration of some sort. There were children in the car which I'm sure, in the dream, were my children (I have none). The ice tunnel we were in collapsed. The ground gave out and everyone fell into frigid water and some of us crawled out but realized we were trapped and there wasn't anything that could be done. The last thing I remember before waking up is that one of my 'children' looked up at me and asked me if we were going to die. The emotions of that situation were overpowering and it didn't seem like a dream as it was happening.

As for the 'if we only use 10% of our brains, what else are we capable of?' question, the mystic in me wants to suggest that we all have the ability of tapping into the collective consciousness of the universe and that all any experience is is a dream that we 'wake up' from and simply enter another dream...foooor evvvver. The realist in me says 'I have no idea and I'm certainly not going to make up some elaborate fairy tale to explain it.'

So goodnight
and goodluck