Thirteen ways my mind looks at things sideways.

Nov 16, 2006

My...states of mind

Earlier this week I found an interesting site about dreams and dream interpretation. I've enjoyed dreams for the same reason I get a kick out of comparative mythology, the tarot, and existential prose: different ways to see the world, and different ways of interpreting and relating to what we see.

1. I don't often remember my dreams.
2. I think this may have something to do with the fact that, from age 13 to 36, I was on a mood-altering medication (it was actually used as an anticonvulsant. Yayz epilepsy. Not.)
3. This past week, I've had three dreams that I remembered.
4. Just my luck - all of them dealt with dreaming that my recruiting agency had called to tell me to start the new job early. And they were dreams, not actual real phone calls. Eh beh.
5. Other dreams I've remembered ended with: Ursa having his head in a crocodile's mouth (the croc was apparently another pet of mine, and this was play to them); being 100% convinced that I was supposed to be living on another planet and that, because I didn't have my paperwork in order, I'd be deported; and drinking really weak coffee. (It's bad enough to grind and brew coffee that ends up being so old as to be tasteless. It's just cruel to re-live that experience in any way, shape, or form. I woke up sneering, for pity's sake.)
6. When I was learning Mandarin Chinese, I once dreamt in Chinese. I could recognize the language; but the only words I could remember to say, in the dream, were ting bu dong (I hear but I don't understand).
7. I remember having a dream once where I was at someone's house. All the walls were grey, and there was no furniture — but one wall almost every room had a single sloppy stoke of color on it. (Red, yellow, blue, green, black...) I can't remember anything else about the dream.
8. I once dreamt that someone was ripping our garage door off of its hinges. I woke up...to discover that it was my father's snoring, a-a-all the way on the other side of the house.
9. An altered state, more than a dream: once during high school, when I had my learner's permit, Dad was going to let me drive to school. I wasn't quite awake yet, so when I backed out into the street, I spent half a minute looking at the steering wheel before I decided that, yes, it was indeed upside down. I proceeded to try and turn it right-side up. (We were moving half a mile an hour, if that fast, so I didn't hit anything...but I didn't drive to school that day.)
10. Shortly after moving back down from Canada, I woke up nearly every night convinced that I was in the wrong place. That went on for about two months, and only stopped happening gradually.
11. I have actually dreamed about writing HTML. I was contracting for Big MegaComputerCorp, helping with their site redesign; and since this was back in 1997, the site was several thousand manually-created pages.
12. I can't recall having a lucid, story-like dream; nor have I ever really had dreams that inspired me to write prose or paint or create something. (That could all be tied in with the whole drugged-and-thus-not-remembering, or I could just be very boring. Toss a coin...)
13. I love the book The Architect of Sleep, which deals with parallel evolution and a society run by clairivoyant dreamers.

Other T13 Participants

1. Mama Duck (first commenter here!!)
2. Beaumont the Blue (my first visit + comment of the week)
3. Coffee Shop Mafia (my second visit + comment...because who can resist such a title?)
4. Yellow Rose Garden (my third visit + comment)
5. Within Me Without Me (my fourth visit - can't comment, because I don't have a Blogger account and don't want to sign up for one.)
6. A Southern Girl's Guide to Just About Anything (my fifth visit + comment; and happy birthday to her!!)
7. My Sick Mind (where I threw Borat under the bus)
8. Dolce Bellezza (seventh visit + comment)
9. Virtual Hobby Store and Coffee Shop (eighth visit + comment)
10. The Screaming Pages (when I first visited, she didn't have her list up yet...it's there now!! [but I should just shut up, because technically it's still Wednesday.])
11. The Amazing Six (thirteen reasons her grandpa got kicked out of Wal-mart! my hero!)
12. Amy's Random Musings (lists 13 places she'd love to visit)
13. West of Mars (13 odd experiences)
14. Loose Leaf Notes
15. Domestic Geek
16. The Naked Truth (worries for the week...or more)
17. Busy Ramblings (their second round of this meme)
18. The Ice Box (their first round of T13)

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