I get a lot of exercise when I sleep. I seem to spend a good-sized proportion of the night running from big scary things, or hoards of little scary things, or things that wouldn’t be scary at all, if I were awake. As someone trained in statistics, I recognize that I’m getting a biased sample here, because these are the dreams voted “runner up” most likely to wake me up. The winner being the DamnItICan’tFindABathroom dream, where I run around and can’t find an available bathroom, or can’t find one I would use. Once my subconscious gets the hint I usually wake right up.
The only somewhat unbiased sample of dreams I have, are the dreams going on when the alarm goes off. And some of those are frankly weird, on the verge of being scary dreams, but not quite scary enough to actually wake me up. Not a few of them are full-fledged running dreams, so I know that I dream like that even when it doesn’t wake me up. And then there are the sorting dreams...
These are the dreams that are the funniest in retrospect, and they don’t generally make very much sense. They remind me strongly of the writing exercise I had in grade school, where you’re given words or a picture and then have to make up a story about them. I think they come from one rather bored subsection of my subconscious sitting on the counter watching the postal clerk part of my brain sort little tidbits of information into short-term or long-term memory or, of course, the circular file. So to entertain itself it makes up stores with randomly selected tidbits as they go flashing by.
Also being processed at the same time are the things the librarian is pulling from the dusty old stacks, for which I had put a request in to retrieve from long-term storage. This is why the dreams will have things like “that dark-haired actress, who played the bright one against a dim Uma Thurman…”, because I need the name retrieved from long-term storage, so she passes by the sorting desk and gets put in a dream, along with stock option pricing mechanisms and a location in a forest that bears a striking resemblance to the picture I want to hang in my office. When that begins to makes too much sense, another random element will get thrown in like the homeless guy I walk by every day who gets rude when people don’t give him enough money. So in a way it also reminds of the writing exercise where a story gets handed around a circle of writers and you each write a few paragraphs based on the information available from only the previous paragraph. The story starts to lurch around.
Until the invisible horsemen from Tolkien show up, and then I start to RUN...