Do you dream each night? Do you keep a dream journal? Can you control your dreams (a technique called "lucid dreaming")? Have you ever written anything inspired by a dream before?
In my non-fiction class, another student wrote his piece on how he tried to learn lucid dreaming. In order to do so, he started a dream journal and wrote down his dreams in order to look for patterns in them.
After reading it, I found myself thinking a lot about my own dreams, or more, my own process of dreaming. Sometimes, I know I'm dreaming and I can control what happens, but I'm not always aware of it. In fact, many times, I'll be going along wherever the dream takes me, believing it, until something happens that I don't want to (for example, I'll be hiding from someone and they'll find me) and I'll be, like, "Nope, that didn't just happen" and "undo it." This only worked so long until my brain eventually figured it out, and now most of the time when I change something, the next thing I know I'm "waking-up" in my dream, only to realize I'm still dreaming because the room isn't the right one, I'm not in the right place, clothes, etc. Once, I "woke-up" six times before I woke-up in real life. It's a lot like the movie inception, only I can't do into other people's dreams, just my own :P
As a psych student, I hear a lot about dreams and dreaming and all the different theories of what they are and how (or even if) you can interpret them. The truth is, all they really know is that, even though everyone dreams, it is a unique, individualized process and no one knows for certain what they mean... but if anyone could figure one out, it would be the person who dreamt it.
