These Dreams

Years ago, while at a music conference, I attended a class on dream interpretation. What messages are you receiving in your dreams? What issues are you unknowingly wrestling with or are causing you worry? The main idea I took away from that class was that 98% of your dreams are about you, even when they seem to be about someone or something else.

My fascination with the meanings of my dreams started when I was very young and continues today. The vivid pictures conveyed in my sleep and rife with symbolism cause me to get very little sleep. I dream constantly. On average, over the last three months, I have slept about five and a half hours per night. During that time, I am in REM sleep for a little more than and hour and a half on average. It's during REM sleep that we dream.

Some nights, my dreams are like movies: long and detailed and laden with characters from childhood through my most recent interaction. Most often those dreams are about my lifelong struggle to feel accepted and loved. Sometimes, however, they are celebrations or reminders of how fortunate I have been to know such a diverse crowd of influential people.

Other nights, I dream in short vignettes that are seemingly not connected in anyway. The meanings or the messages in those dreams vary. But they are widely connected to my worries or some sort of grieving I am experiencing internally. For example, over the course of the last three years, I have had many different dreams involving one friend in particular. We were estranged over the last three years and, while the situations were always different, the ending was always the same. We would be on a trip or at the beach or out shopping and, in the end, my friend would leave me or ditch me or abandon me in a parking lot. I felt lost and intensely sad every time I awoke from one of those dreams. We have since reconciled and the dreams have stopped.

I am grateful for my sleepless nights because dreaming puts me firmly in touch with everything that's really going on in my head and my heart. I often ask God to speak to me in my dreams. I feel like that's the only time I am quiet enough to receive guidance. My dreams are the reason I just know things sometimes too. Intuition, for me, goes beyond a feeling. It is an experience that most often teaks place while I am asleep.

So, what are you dreaming about?

Dreams are the most curious asides and soliloquies of the soul. When a man recollects his dream, it is like meeting the ghost of himself. Dreams often surprise us into the strangest self-knowledge.... Dreaming is the truest confessional, and often the sharpest penance. ~Alexander Smith (1829–1867), "On Dreams and Dreaming"