Friday, February 5, 2016

I dreamed a dream (and now I'm hungry)

Nobody knows why we dream. Millions of years of evolution, eye-popping advancements in neuroscience and general scientific research, and yet there’s not one person on this planet who can explain to me why I dreamt last week about being locked in a jail cell with Steve Urkel from “Family Matters.”

This actually happened.

The only reason I can still remember it is because the dream was so disconcertingly real and vivid that when I awoke, it took a matter of minutes before I realized I was in my apartment, sweating and clutching a Garfield stuffed animal. (Hey, don’t judge me.) Some of the details are fuzzy, but I remember looking through a set of bars at a gawking gaggle of old high school classmates, some of whom I haven’t seen since pagers were considered cool. Sitting next to me on a bunk bed was the iconic 80s sitcom nerd, decked out in his trademark glasses and suspenders, asking me if I had any cheese.

I did not, in fact, have any cheese. It’s a testament to how real the dream was that I remember being disappointed about this.

There have been a handful of times in my life when I’ve yearned for some kind of in-depth dream analysis, and I’d love to hear a professional’s take on my faux acid trip. A psychiatrist would no doubt find symbolism in every little detail: The high school entourage representing a yearning for familiarity and the past, the jail representing my entrapment in the present. Steve Urkel representing my love of dairy products. That’ll be $125, please.

It’s unclear from my five minutes of Internet research that there’s any validity to dream analysis. Were I to seek it out, it would be with the same indulgent interest I’d express in getting my palms read -- entertaining, sure, but a lot of hocus pocus, nothing to be taken too seriously. Because the fact is that we still don’t know the purpose of dreams. There are theories, some more plausible than others, and there are encouraging lines of research being conducted. But the brain is still largely a mystery. For all I know I was dreaming about jail because of that nasty crime I’m thinking about committing. Which reminds me, I need to buy a length of rope and a 12-pack of industrial-strength suction cups.

For all the research that’s been conducted, there are only subtle clues here and there as to what this dreaming business is really all about. Some believe it’s a way for the brain to process memory and emotion. There’s an area of the brain called the hippocampus, and disappointingly, it has nothing to do with hippopotamuses playing disc golf and learning algebra; rather, it’s a big lump of brain that theorists surmise takes short-term memories and transfers them over to the neocortex, where long-term memory is stored. It’s possible that dreaming helps along this process of essentially moving stuff around from one storage unit to another. So the Reader’s Digest version would go something like this: You go to bed having just learned the shocking news that your half-sister Alice once partied in the back of Snoop Dogg’s tour bus. A week of dreams, and then poof! You’ll never forget it. As much as you might try. And try. And try.

And of course there’s the psychoanalytical take. In the words of the informative but boring-sounding Medical News Today, dreaming “provides a psychological space where overwhelming, contradictory, or highly complex notions can be brought together by the dreaming ego that would be unsettling while awake. This process serves the need for psychological balance and equilibrium.” 

In other words, dreaming keeps you from going nuts. Possibly. Obviously it’s not a foolproof method, judging from the number of people who are crazy enough to sit through the “Alvin and the Chipmunks” movies. But maybe it helps.

Although it would do little to explain the wacky dreams that sometimes take place during childhood; I mean, how much psychological maintenance do you need when your primary concerns are nougat bars and Star Wars? I’ve had two recurring dreams in my life, and both took place when I was very, very young. In the earlier one, Superman was dead, and his ghost was haunting my hometown, which in the dream was an old-timey, Ichabod Crane-type village with smoking chimneys and shoddily-clad townspeople washing linens in buckets by dusty roadsides. My mother and I were Ghostbusters. Assigned to the Superman case, we zapped the zombified comic book character with our ghostbusting implements, which were made from the dead branches of a nearby maple tree. His ectoplasmic essence was trapped inside the contents of a dog-eared comic, where he belonged. When I awoke I had mixed emotions: Yay for me and my spectre-defying mom, boo to the idea of the favorite son of Krypton lying dead on a sheet of flimsy newsprint. I hadn’t been that confused since … well, ever, since I was 6.

Now I ask you, what in the name of Clark Kent would a dream like that do for my psychological stability? I’m guessing not much, since I grew up to write columns about heavy metal and duck farts.

Since nobody seems to have a definitive answer to the dream question, perhaps the truth lies in none of the above. Over the past few years I’ve noticed that my dreams are always more vivid during bouts of heavy reading, so it’s possible they’re nothing more than the subconscious expression of our imaginations -- a slumbering creature stretching its limbs, testing its boundaries. The jail, the spectators, all of it just shadow puppets cast by the more impish inclinations of our minds. Too bad no one can say for sure.

One of these days I’ll ask Steve Urkel. Maybe he knows.

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