Wednesday, May 05, 2004

up; not Chosen

I was exhausted this evening and went to bed early, knowing that I would wake up in the middle of the night and then Be Up. So here I am, Up. I had been having some not especially interesting dream. Jane Pauley was involved. She haunts me.

It got me thinking about what an amazing thing dreams are, though. If you were the only person in the world who had dreams, how would you explain it to someone else? "When I sleep, it's like these little movies start to play in my head; there like stories, but they don't always make sense. Like sometimes I'll be in my RV and then walk into the next room and suddenly it's my fifth grade classroom. And usually it's the case that it's like I'm in the movie, and but at the same time it's also like I'm watching the movie happen."

And, surely, you would think you were Chosen for some great purpose that was being revealed to you in your dreams. You probably wouldn't have a hard time convincing other people you were Chosen after a few episodes of you describing your dreams. That sentence right there could be the foundation of an evolutionary psychological theory of dreams. In any case, it's remarkable how dreams can evince an effortless creativity for something that would be so much work, if possible at all, when one is awake.

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