But A Dream Within A Dream

March 1, 1995
Once my dad had a dream he saw Indians riding bikes.

March 3, 1995
Last night my brother had a dream he flushed Cyres Jorge down the toylet.


I've always thought that dreams are fascinating. It's fun to find correlations between what you dreamed about and what's going on in your life at the moment. It's amazing when answers come to you in your dream, almost as if your brain is using that time to make sense out of predicaments that are too complex when we're busy during the day. When I was working on making a parody video of Robert Pattinson's fans (which can be viewed here), I had dreams about the guy. Very weird to experience, very interesting to think about from an objective perspective.

As fun as it is to analyze these things, I've come to realize that I tend to rate my dreams differently than most people. From what I've gathered, most people tend to rate their dreams based on content. If you hooked up with your current love interest, it's a good dream. If there are flesh-eating zombies everywhere, it's a bad dream. However, content doesn't really factor as much into how I rate my dreams. I tend to rate my dreams on the intensity of the emotions involved. If there are diseased zombies all over the place, attacking my loved ones, yet it's as though I'm merely watching a movie and am not emotionally invested in it, the dream doesn't bother me. I don't view it as a "bad" dream. However, I've had dreams where the content would normally be rated "good," but the level of intensity of my emotions in the dream were so high that they felt real. I woke up still feeling that way, and it's such a worrisome experience that I rate the dream as "bad." For example, I once had a dream that I was in love with someone. The entire dream was just the two of us being together, in love. We laughed, we hung out, it was overall a "good" dream, when judged solely by its content. But the feeling of being in love was so intense and so real, that when I woke up the next morning, it was shocking. It jarred me so much that I considered it a bad dream. Obviously when positive emotions can earn a "bad" rating, then negative emotions most certainly can.

Thus far, I haven't met anyone else who rates dreams the same way. Most people tell me that content is the main factor in determining whether or not their dream is a good or bad one. I've even had some people tell me that their dreams are hardly emotional to begin with. Does this make me more emotional than most? Or am I simply analyzing things differently? You be the judge.