#35: "to sleep, perchance to dream"

When I was a kid my grandmother had this old book about interpreting your dreams. I was somewhere around age ten, and the book had to be from the 60's. Looking back it seems the perfect age of both of those things to find each other.

She believed in all sorts of strange things that came out of that book. I wish I could remember them now, but they really made no sense. I mean, they made perfect sense to the mind of a child, but she should have known better. She would use them to try and interpret luck, or that she was going to come in to money, or that something ominous was going to happen. There was never luck in the long term (she sometimes found it in a bingo hall), and we never came into money, and nothing scary/strange/interesting ever happened in that little town.

I'm not sure when we stopped talking about the dream book. I bet it was one of the things we cleaned out of her house when she passed away. There were some really strange things in that house that would give some people nightmares - like the bag of off-brand Cheetos we found in the back of the fridge that expired in 1993 (she passed in 2008). 

But dreams are strange like that, in that some people want so desperately to find meaning in the senseless ramblings of the recently asleep subconscious. It's like trying to figure out why my grandmother kept those Cheetos in the fridge for fifteen years.

I don't remember my dreams these days. To be perfectly honest, I haven't really remembered my dreams for more than a few minutes in a very long time. I have tried at different times in the past to write down my dreams when I wake up, but that has presented two distinct problems. The first is that dreams are so abstract that even trying to write them down with any detail seems silly. The second is that I'm nearsighted, and trying to write down what I've just dreamed as quickly as possible usually means I don't try and find my glasses and thus I write down unintelligible nonsense. Believe me, the things I write without my glasses on are about as easily readable as the things I attempt to write left handed.

While we were in Cannes and Barcelona last week things changed. The first afternoon nap I took in Cannes had a dream in it. Can't tell you what it was now, but I remember waking up and just noting that I must have really crashed hard since I had a dream. They kept happening, though, and over the course of the trip Amy and I both woke up and traded interesting tidbits of the dreams we'd both been having on a daily basis. It was as if there was something in the water in Europe that was causing them (and that's why they don't just bring you a glass of water to the restaurant table...). It added an interesting twist to a very fun trip.

But just as quickly as the dreams started, we returned to New York and they ceased. I'm beginning to think that the only reason I had dreams there was because we were on holiday away from Fred and I could sleep soundly because my subconscious knew that it didn't have to listen out for him. Maybe this is why all parents are always tired; maybe you just don't get deep sleep after you have kids. I don't know what kind of meaning one can interpret out of not having dreams after you have kids. Maybe it just means Cheetos.