Dream Speak

This morning I was sound asleep when the phone rang, interrupting an ongoing dream. It was like walking into a room where suddenly the conversation stops because you weren’t supposed to hear it. It was obvious that this dream was just background processing and was never intended to be remembered or analyzed by consciousness.

The central plot involved a (fictional) lackluster farewell party from a recent employer. It was set in the neighborhood I was raised in as a kid. It included several former bosses and partners from wildly different times in my life, and employees, and even neighborhood kids where I grew up. It included bedrooms and certain hills and furniture and foods. When this dream was suddenly exposed to the light of day, it was loaded with so many anachronisms that it made no sense.

However, there was something compelling about the power of every little component of this dream. Suddenly I realized that the food, the location, every person, every little background element were all big things that I identified with. They made up my identity over the years. It was a little like having my life flash before my eyes, but completely in the language of dream speak.

A person’s identity is always changing. You can’t stay in the same role as little kid, or high school student, or parent, or worker. The zillions of individual components that make up your brain and mind all buy into your identity to some degree, so it makes sense that they need to do some processing to adjust to those constant changes.

I feel like I just got an unexpectedly intimate look inside myself.