Why Don't I Dream?

I'm one of those people who scare the crap out of roommates by opening one eye on you when you get too close to me when I'm sleeping.

I don't dream, or at least so it seems. I close my eyes, then I wake up. Every single night for more than a year.

Perhaps I move around in an astral body, floating between time and space learning the vast secrets of the universe then return to my physical body where I am not allowed to remember such things.

Perhaps I have the same vivid and graphic nightmares every night that I had as a child and my mind blocks out these images because I can't stand the mental trauma.

Whatever it is, I know that as far I'm concerned I don't have dreams.

They say a dream is a wish your heart makes. Maybe I don't have any wishes, so I don't have any dreams. But that doesn't make any sense. My wishes for the world are so grand that I could easily be labeled an "idealist."

It could be a chemical thing, when I went puritanical (straight-edge) for awhile my dreams sort of came back. At least occasionally anyway. Maybe alcohol and marijuana disturb my sleep. I like that one, my understanding of science agrees with the notion that each of us have unique body chemistry that reacts differently to compounds released into the bloodstream.

I believe our dreams are significant to understanding our psyche, and I feel cheated by not knowing what they are.

It's kind of hard to start a dream journal, like some have suggested to me when I mention this to them, when every entry would read "no dreams last night."

Another explanation might be that I expend all my creative juices with my constant flights of fancy and then when I fall asleep my mind is fresh out of imagery to dance in front of me.

Most take their dreams for granted, most hardly give them a second thought. But take them away from someone and they would feel a loss.

Well I don't miss what I barely ever knew.

Dreams, for me, are like treasures denied to me. I envy you dreamers, you all have something I have not had in years. It is a gift, to dream in the mind eternal.

***

Get this:

I wrote the above text last night before going to sleep. After writing this, I dreamt last night. I guess it served as a dream journal, priming my mind to draw the dreams denied to me for more than a year to the part of my brain that allows me to remember them.

They were weird dreams, extremely weird.

The first dream was me cleaning out the trunk of car with Bill O'Reilly helping me. No seriously, I'm not kidding that was really my dream. We were having some sort of political debate, the context of which I cannot recall. The part that stands out is that he made some kind of point to me while we dug through the crap in my trunk and I was parsing this comment by saying "you are right about..." and then he interrupted me to say "damn right, I'm right!" Last part I remember of that dream was me giving him a sour puss as we aired out a dirty comforter.

The second dream was more like my typical dreams that I have remembered from the past: it played out like a horror movie. I was on a house boat, or a barge, with a big hole in the middle of the deck leading down into the water. There were people diving underneath us (I don't know who the other people were) and a big crane running a rope down into the water. Suddenly the rope snapped and there was screaming coming from whoever was with me. I was panicked and staring down into the water, which was amazing blue and clear like the waters of Hawaii or Jamaica, and felt as if someone I cared deeply for was in danger. The last image of the dream was a huge black octopus coming into view in the depths of the sea.