"Weird Dreams Inside the Goldmine"

Man I had a fucked up dream last night.

I don't have a lot of nightmares. I'm sure I've had more then I think, but I forget them - but there have been maybe 2 or 3 that have stuck with me. One from when I was in 3rd grade and a giant bee was attacking me at my grandma's house. The other one from from about 6 years ago when I was living alone and being chased by werewolves. I woke from that dream and experienced "sleep paralysis" - I was awake but could not move for about 30 seconds. It felt like something, a ghost maybe, was moving thru me - pinning me to the bed.


And that's about it. We've all had dreams were we've woken up and said, "thank god that was just a dream." Are those nightmares? Or something else? Let's turn to Carl Sagan for some answers.....

In his book, "The Dragons of Eden", Carl writes extensively on dreams and where they come from and their use. Some quotes:

"The most recent dinosaur fossil is dated at about sixty million years ago. The family of man (but not the genus Homo) is some tens of millions of years old. Could there have been manlike creatures who actually encountered Tyrannosaurus rex? Could there have been dinosaurs that escaped the extinctions in the late Cretaceous Period? Could the pervasive dreams and common fears of "monsters", which children develop shortly after they are able to talk, be evolutionary vestiges of quite adaptive-baboonlike-responses to dragons and owls "

"What functions do dreams serve today? One view, published in a reputable scientific paper, holds that the function of dreams is to wake us up a little, every now and then, to see if anyone is about to eat us. But dreams occupy such a relatively small part of normal sleep that this explanation does not seem very compelling. Moreover, as we have seen, the evidence points just the other way: today it is the mammalian predators, not the mammalian prey, who characteristically have dream-filled sleep.

Much more plausible is the computer-based explanation that dreams are a spillover from the unconscious processing of the day’s experience, from the brain’s decision on how much of the daily events temporarily stored in a kind of buffer to emplace in long-term memory. The events of yesterday frequently run through my dreams; the events of two days ago, much more rarely. However, the buffer-dumping model seems unlikely to be the whole story, because it does not explain the disguises that are so characteristic of the symbolic language of dreams, a point first stressed by Freud. It also does not explain the powerful affect or emotions of dreams; I believe there are many people who have been far more thoroughly frightened by their dreams than by anything they have ever experienced while awake."

one more from Carl to sum it all up, then I'll talk about my dream. He goes on to talk about the R-Complex (Reptilian Complex) , the oldest part of the human brain. Millions of years of evolution have built the human brain as we know it today, with all differnt parts and layers - but the R-Complex is still there, buried underneath. And it still functions. Take it away Carl.....

"We are descended from reptiles and mammals both. In the daytime repression of the R-complex and in the nighttime stirring of the dream dragons, we may each of us be replaying the hundred-million-year-old warfare between the reptiles and the mammals. Only the times of day of the vampiric hunt have been reversed.

Human beings exhibit enough reptilian behavior as it is. If we gave full rein to the reptilian aspects of our nature, we would clearly have a low survival potential. Because the R-complex is woven so intimately into the fabric of the brain, its functions cannot be entirely avoided for long. Perhaps the dream state permits, in our fantasy and its reality, the R-complex to function regularly, as if it were still in control."

When we dream it's as if we are viewing the world as a snake would.

heavy.

Okay, enough of that, let's get to my dream last night. I've tried to piece most of it together this morning, but I feel some of it is still missing. I've got the juicy bits at least. It was a dream, within a dream, within a dream....believe it or not.

MY DREAM
the dream started out that I was staring in this new t.v show. I was walking into a restaurant and accidently bumped into this guy. He wasn't anyone I knew but looked like a pretty normal dude. I said sorry and got no reaction from him. So I made a sarcastic remark like, "At least you could say no problem or something." He then turned to me and started yelling and hitting me. I said "It's cool, never mind", and left the restaurant.

I started walking across the street and looked behind me - the guy was following me. I went into another store and tried to get away. He found me and continued to berate me. Turns out that this guy was my new partner in a this Cop/Investigator show I was staring in. He started to laugh and I felt relived. It had all been set up for us to meet like this by the dept we were working for. We shook hands and I went home.

Once home I felt like someone was there. It was dark outside and only like one light worked in my house. I heard something downstairs and started walking down. I felt a huge amount of terror as I descended the rather long staircase. I then tripped and fell to the bottom of the stars. I couldn't move. I stared up - knowing something was going to drop into my view. Un-fucking-believable terror welled up inside me. Suddenly a vampire-creature-wolf-thing dropped down from the ceiling onto me.

I then woke up.

I was having a seizure and could only open one eye, everything was blurry and I called out for my wife Sarah. There was no one in the room with me. I started stumbling around, looking for anyone to help me - I was shaking and convulsing and my eyes twitching. Then from another room Sarah and three other people came running out. They were yelling, "HE'S HAVING A SEIZURE!" and got me to the ground. The seizure started to pass and I could start to see more clearly. Things calmed down.

Then I woke up again...

...to see myself attached to a bunch of wires. Sarah was there and the three people that came running out with her from the dream I just had. I asked what was going on and she told me that she had hired these Dream Specialists to help with my nightmares. The three people, two guys and one girl, began talking to me telling they were here to help me and that if I trusted them they could cure me. I started to cry and told them I was willing to try and accepted their help. Sarah and I went outside and I saw my daughter Maggie walking in the driveway. Still crying I called for her to come to me, she started to, then I reached down and picked up a muddied piece of paper with her picture on it.

Then I woke up for real.

jesus motherfucking christ. I laid there in bed breathing heavy and so thankful that what just happened was not real. I was in my real bed with my real wife beside me. About a half hour I lied there thinking about the dreams - Sarah got up to use the bathroom then came back to bed. I reached out to her and told her about what I just went thru. She rubbed my back till I drifted back to sleep.

Snakes must lead fucked up lives.
-Erik