Crazy Dreams

Wednesday night I had the most bizarre dream. Everyone thought I was crazy so I was living in an apartment complex for crazy people. My husband had divorced me, remarried, changed his name, and wouldn't allow me to see my kids. I learned that information from my father, who seemed to be on my husband's side and who hung up on me after relaying the information by telephone. Everyone in my life had cut me off because I was crazy. There was one older woman, a resident of my complex who had befriended me. In the dream I was thinking that she was the only person in the world who would even speak to me and if she were to decide to cut me off I would die....literally. One evening the lady invited me to a party in our building. When I walked in everyone stopped talking and stared at me. I tried to be as still and quiet as I could, but I could tell everyone there hated me. I went to sit down on the couch and the dream ended, with me frozen on the couch trying to be invisible, and everyone glaring at me.

I've always been fascinated with dreams. I guess that's only natural, considering my huge fascination with human behavior. I've read at least three books about dreams, and recently read an article about a new one that I want to buy.

When we sleep, our conscious mind shuts down, and our unconscious mind goes to work to sort out all the bits of information we received during the day. That's why we often wake up in the middle of the night and remember something we tried to think of all day long. Our unconscious mind figured it out for us.

Dreams are a combination of our fears, our emotions, our problems, and anything else we may need to sort out, mixed with images of things we've thought about or seen throughout the day. That's why we may dream we are running from a tornado and we see a character from our favorite movie walking around calmly doing something. We've mixed a fear of something that is threatening us with an image from our day.

But to me, the strangest aspect of dreams are when they appear to be a little psychic. For instance, you have a dream about someone you haven't seen in years, and a few days later they call you. Or, you come up with an idea in your dream, and the next day someone else tells you they've been planning this same idea for weeks. We've all done it. Did we tap into someone else's mind? Thursday morning, when I told my husband about the strange dream I'd had about being crazy, he started looking shocked. You see, that same night my husband had a dream that he ran into an old friend of his he hadn't seen in years. The friend had lost his mind and was now living in some type of apartment building for crazy people.

While dreams may sometimes seem extremely complicated, they usually aren't. I think the dream I described above came from being audited at work that day and knowing I had been under a microscope all day with my office, my staff, and all my work being looked (or stared) at. I was nervous and had said a few things to the auditor that I later thought sounded silly. Thus, later worrying she probably thought I was crazy.

We'll talk more about dreams in the weeks to come. I believe it's very important, because if we understand what our unconscious mind is telling us and pay attention to our dreams, they may just help us work out our problems.