In looking through my e-mail for things I’d meant to blog, but never did, I came across this bit from April of last year:
I’m not much for literal dream interpretation. After some inspection of my own dreams over time, though, I can start to see patterns and themes. Symbolism. Things like that. I can tell what was just thrown into my dreams as a replay of the day’s events, and I can draw parallels between situations in my dreams and situations in real life. I know that certain people that appear in my dreams represent certain aspects of myself.
Lately, I’ve been dreaming about skipping school. Either I really want to skip class and end up just not going to school at all, or I skip class and I didn’t mean to. Sometimes, school is college, and sometimes it’s a weird conglomeration of college and high school.
Yesterday, I posted this dream on Twitter:
Before that, last week, I had a dream that included one of my co-workers. I didn’t write it down, and I didn’t talk about the contents of the dream, so I don’t remember exactly what he was doing in my dream.
As we were standing in line the next day to grab some coffee at Biggby’s, though, I went ahead and told him that he’d been in one of my dreams the previous night. That can be awkward — how do you respond to that? After he blushed and laughed (“I’ve never been in a co-worker’s dream before!”), we ended up having a brief and intriguing conversation about dream interpretation as we waited for our coffee.
He started with, “Do you believe…?”
That kind of opening always evinces the skeptical “hairy eyeball” from me, and this was no exception. Turns out that he wasn’t being quite that open-ended about it, and simply asked what I thought about how the brain reinterprets things in dreams. I made it clear that I don’t believe in clairvoyance or precognition, but that I find it completely possible that the subconscious picks up on clues and signals in our surroundings that we don’t consciously perceive.
Like I’ve mentioned before, I’m pretty sure that the recurring characters in my dreams represent certain aspects of my life. Maybe my co-worker now represents my work life and/or my career in IT.
As for the Japan dream, that one’s easy to interpret.
(BTW, 140 characters was way too short to include all the nuances of the dream. It also included a cashier / counter girl who spoke excellent English and a cash register that doubled as a bun-warmer for sample sandwiches.)