The official site of the sleep-deprived

Monday, December 21, 2009

Overlapping Worlds

Lately I’ve been wondering how much our waking and dream worlds overlap. Of course, we're all familiar with the nightly processing of our daytime issues and how the subconscious communicates advice via dream scenarios. Occasionally we experience dreams that foreshadow things to come in our everyday lives, or journey in our dreams to places that actually exist here on earth––even though we may never have gone there except during sleep.

But a few nights ago, I experienced something new (for me anyway) that caused me to look at the idea from yet another angle. I dreamt a tarantula was in the bedroom and my cat was playing with it. When I awoke in the morning, I noticed she’d pulled out a patch of her fur. Looking closer, I saw about a dozen spider bites on her bare skin!

How much of what’s going on around us are we aware of while we’re asleep? What part of us keeps watch over the waking world and how does it communicate with the dreaming part? Anybody have thoughts or experiences to share about such things? 

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hello,

This is something that I have wondered myself plenty. It is my perspective that some dreams are early forms of communication using emotional energy - like when we fall asleep in front of a TV and our weird dreams are the result of our brains trying to interpret the sounds. So too, some of our dream are our brains trying to interpret the emotional energy that we receive from ourselves and others. (This link goes to a post that offers a far more involved, but confusing explanation of my perspective.) The clearest example I have of this is from a couple of friends of mine, where one lost the dog he inherited from his father when he passed and his wife started having dreams of sadness about the her father and brother when they had passed ten years earlier. The dreams stopped after I had suggested the connection and they had a good long talk about his feelings.

Have a nice day,
Craig

Skye Alexander said...

Thanks for your insights, Craig. Interesting stuff. - Cheers, Skye