"Dream a little dream of me."

Our minds do some strange things while we're asleep. Especially mine. I've been a vivid dreamer all of my life. To this day, I can remember images like movie stills from dreams as young as 5 and 6. I can also be a lucid dreamer, on the rare occasion. (I find the "hands" reality check to be the most effective way for me to determine if I'm lucid dreaming.)


Dreams feel real while we're in them. It's only when we wake up
that we realize something was actually strange. (INCEPTION)



My dreams are pretty epic. I never have the "Oh look at that funny purple cat," it's usually something Spielbergian in scope. If only there was some way to record all the potential blockbusting movies that play in my head nightly... oh wait, we may actually be getting closer to that possibility! For a more low-tech solution, I've kept dream journals for most of my life. I get these intense dreams when I'm worried about something, when I'm healthy and well-rested, and sometimes after intense events and stressors.

I also have recurring dream symbols and nightmares. I used to dream about tornados- dozens of them, and having to outrun them in a car. Sometimes I dream about bridges that climb into the sky for miles and become literally rail thin, or have a gap in the middle that I have to accelerate my car to make the jump. Sometimes I dream about my teeth breaking and falling out (a classic symbol about health concerns). I used to dream about being chased through familiar buildings when I was in high school. I even have a complete dream neighborhood that I could map out down to the street, based on my hometown neighborhood growing up; there's the residential section, a park (usually with a carnival), a boardwalk and beach, a school, a gas station, a municipal complex and two schools. And everything is always located in the same place in those dreams.

I know I mentioned I have complex, vivid, epic dreams. Take Tuesday night, for example. After Red Tent Temple, I dreamed about a lightning storm, two blond sisters named Alexa and Ivy, good-looking twin teenaged boys from outer space asleep in the guest bedroom of my parents' house, and throwing water balloons at a former student staff member of mine. TOTES made sense at the time, while I was asleep.

Some of my other crazy dreams:

• Going shopping at Kmart with Anthony Bourdain and watching strange cloud formations in the sky with him.
• Watching a nuclear bomb detonate and then fleeing from Nazi zombies in an old abandoned school bus in the deserted wasteland of D.C.
• Speaking of D.C., helping the Obamas move into the White House and unpack.
• Getting married in the parking lot of a McDonald's after the rabbi (who's played by a former colleague of mine) gets run over by an old hoopdie Buick driven by kids in Halloween masks.
• Fighting off zombie robots (that is, robots that came out of the ground) at my college with my fellow RAs and campus police.
• Fighting off zombie children on the Atlantic City Boardwalk and hiding in a museum that gets hit with a tidal wave.
• Helping former President Bush (Jr.) find prostitutes in D.C.

My favorite dream? Last year I randomly dreamed my sister walked up to me on the street and told me she was 8 weeks pregnant with a little girl.  That was it, that was the whole dream. The next morning, I was talking with her online and mentioned the dream. She stopped IMing me and then called my cell phone. *cue freaky music* She was calling to tell me (the first person she told besides her husband) that she was actually 5 weeks pregnant and had only known for about 5 days. Also? I'm now an Auntie to a niece. BAM! How do you like them apples?!

If you'd like to read even weirder tales of the things my brain makes up while I'm asleep, feel free to check out the Dreams tag at my *embarrased sideways glance* LiveJournal. Now, I haven't written in that thing in probably over a year or more, and a good number of entries are hidden behind a Friends-Only privacy lock, but there's still plenty of unprotected entries for you to enjoy :)

What are some of the weirder, cooler, or potentially precognitive dreams you've had?

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Other updates:

+ Only 2 days until the RESOLVE of New England Fertility Treatment, Donor Choices, and Adoption Conference! The Stirrup Queen herself, Melissa Ford, will be our keynote speaker!

+ Have you donated to my Fertile Fall Fundraiser yet? I've only raised $10 so far, and I've got $1990 to go!

+ NaBloPoMo is hard. Seriously. Expect some WAY random posts, like this one.

+ And finally, I've apparently won the WEGO Health Vlog Contest for my first vlog last week. I'm getting an iPod Touch... word!