Dreams. You know, like the Cranberries song.

I'm about to enter dangerous waters: I plan to type something related to sleep. In the past, whenever I've done this it ends up amounting to little more than me complaining about how hard life is for poor little old me. I realize this, and I realize it's probably not very interesting to anyone who actually reads this. But I think this one's different. Yes, I'll probably get a little long-winded (I probably already have), but there's more to this one.

Dreams. Lately I've been having some amazingly vivid, sometimes horrifying dreams. Regardless of the content, I'll frequently wake up and have an insanely hard time trying to distinguish between the dream and reality. One time - and I'm not exaggerating - it took me nearly an hour to figure out which one was real. And that's the thing about dreams: within the dream itself, it is indistinguishable from reality. It makes no difference what's going on. Let's use a cliche dream (that I don't remember ever having) and say I'm flying. In that moment, I am actually experiencing that sensation. According to the signals bouncing around my brain, I am truly actually having the experience of flying through the air. My brain is telling me that I see the ground hundreds of feet below me. It's telling me I feel the wind blowing past me, and that I hear it rush over my ears. In a truly vivid dream, every one of the senses experiences a sensation related to the events of the dream. And this is why I would argue that dreams are essentially indistinguishable from experiences we have in reality. Our senses are our only connection with the outside world. If, right now, I pulled a Superman and started flying around, the only way I would know I'm having that experience is through my senses. So, if I sense that in a dream, how is it any different?

I guess it could be argued that the sensations experienced during a dream are only the mind's best approximation of what we would sense in that situation. But there is a much more weighty side to dreams - the emotion attached. In a vivid flying dream, my brain really thinks that I am flying. It then provides the appropriate emotional response to that (excitement, freedom, fear, whatever). To my brain, I am actually flying, so even if the experience is different than it would be in reality, the emotional response is indistinguishable.

Usually, for me, the more tragic and emotionally unsettling dreams stick (though this isn't always the case). I'm tempted to write some of them out, but I'm afraid they'll appear trite to anyone other than me (I've never been told a dream that meant as much to me as it did to the person that had it. Usually it means nothing). I guess the question that's been on my mind lately is this: What should be done with the very real emotion experienced in very unreal (even surreal) dreams?

And I suppose a universal answer to this question doesn't exist, but I think I know how most people deal with it. There is one sharp distinction between dreams and reality, and that is continuity. If I break my leg in a dream, I will almost definitely not have a broken leg in the next dream I have. But if I break my leg before going to bed, it'll still be broken when I wake up. Using this logic, we can talk ourselves through the aftermath of the dream. It usually goes something like this. Only with the blurriness that accompanies the early morning. "Okay, what just happened? Oh no, someone killed Mildred. How did this happen? This is so surreal. What am I going to do? I've got to do something. Okay, I'm in my bed. If someone just killed Mildred five minutes ago, and I was there, and it JUST happened, how did I get into bed? It must have just been a dream. It was nothing." Then we go about our regular daily routine, not thinking much about it. If you still have a strange feeling about it, you might call Mildred, just in case. But everything in reality points to the fact that this event did not occur, so you can safely push it aside and never think about it again. Unlike a real event, there will be no reminders (e.g., Mildred will not have a funeral, she will not be permanently absent from your life) so it can safely be forgotten.

I'm not sure this is the best way to deal with this kind of situation. In this example, Mildred, who is presumably a close friend or family member, has been killed. In that instant of the dream, and possibly for a brief moment upon waking, the real emotions accompanying the murder of someone close to you could be felt. Not only can you feel the somewhat common emotion of the loss of a loved one, but also the less common knowledge that someone caused this to happen, possibly a desire for revenge, possibly the horror of having witnessed it, and in the worst of scenarios, being responsible yourself. I think these emotions express several things about our personalities that are valuable tools in understanding ourselves. I've already gone on too long here, so I'll condense this thought. We might as well process the experiences we have and use them to our advantage rather than push them aside and potentially allow them to build up into who-knows-what.

That was a little less coherent than I originally planned, but I think I got most of it out there. Anyways, that's what I've been thinking lately.

smooth like glass, they want it fast

so first things first: it's a girl. so that's pretty exciting.

i made pizza today. it was good, not great, and now i have horrible gas. too much information? too bad. it's not like you can unread it.

i just finished reading "stiff." it was surprisingly really really good. and then, without thinking why, i started reading "a grief observed." you'd think i was obsessing over death, but i'm really not. you have to admit though, no matter what religious or philosophical beliefs you agree with, death will always be an interesting topic. it's just so profound no matter how you look at it.

there was a quote in "a grief observed"...as in, c.s. lewis quoted someone within the book, saying something along the lines of "i stay up all night with a toothache thinking about my toothache and how i'm staying up all night." there's some truth in there. just the way that an affliction leads to suffering. it's a positive feedback loop (is that redundant? can you have a negative feedback loop? or just negative feedback?). the more you suffer, the more your mind focuses on that suffering, which only intensifies the pain. that's exactly how my sleep issues go. the proof is the fact that i'm writing this sentence right now. it's about 3:30 in the morning, i'm not asleep, i'm stressing about not being asleep, and it's making it harder to get to sleep. the problem with my issue is that that stress has built up over the past 12-ish years so that it's really a constant thing. it's not like an occasional bad night. before i even think about going to bed, there's already that worry that i won't fall asleep. and so i don't. anyways, enough of that.

how am i supposed to be responisible for giving a name to another human being? i'm never satisfied with the arbitrary decisions i make. and this is so permanent. "hey gertrude, can you come here for a second? your mother and i have decided that you're named gretchen now. well, for the rest of the month at least. there are some talks of switching over to winifred." yeah.

that's all.

you can scoop out my brain, shape it into an ear and then tell me your pain

by three months i really meant seven. but whatever. a lot has happened since i last wrote about not a whole lot. which means this is going to be another post full of gratuitous nothingness, covering far too much time to contain anything particularly detailed. the idea, which i realize will likely never develop into anything more than an idea, is to start writing enough that i can include a detail here and there.

here's a moment of false pride. the real reason i'm writing again: i like my writing. not that anyone else does, or should for that matter. but its a testament to anyone's artistic accomplishments when they like their own art. metal fans write metal music until they are good enough to be their own fans. and so on. i guess basically i'm saying that my writing has developed enough over the years that i've found a "voice" that's some sort of approximation of the authors i most enjoy. it makes it fun to go back and read things that were written long enough ago that their content has been forgotten. again, i don't expect anyone else to find any satisfaction in my writing.

anothe reason i'm writing again is so that kari will finally stop telling me to update my blog. for some reason she expects me to, despite the fact that i've never, ever, ever kept a frequently updated anything. so this one's for you kari.

kari's pregnant. tomorrow we get to go to the doctor. he'll shoot sound waves into kari. some of those sound waves will bounce off the baby's private parts so that we'll know if we should buy everything blue or pink. that's pretty exciting.

i guess that's it for now. i don't want to overdo it. or is it already overdid? shoot. k, bye.

Ah, the blog

for some reason, every 3 months or so, usually in the middle of the night, i decide that writing regularly in a blog will be mildly entertaining. then i write one in excusably lame entry and give up forever. and by forever i mean until 3 months later. it's a cycle, you know?

so right now i'm trying to figure out why i can't write songs anymore. the last one i wrote was at the beginning of the summer of 2007, so nearly 2 years ago. that's probably the song i'm most happy with, at least as far as the recorded version goes. in the past, i've been more satisfied with every song that i write (well, usually), and when i write, i'm inspired to write more. so why is it that that momentum stopped all of a sudden? bear with me as i think out loud. or online. or whatever.

one thing is, i got married. now this isn't a bad thing, and i'm very happy i did it. but i think it brought about some things that are getting in the way of writing songs. one thing is that i'm alone much less. and when i am alone, it's usually because i can't sleep, meaning it's the middle of the night and i ought not make much noise. before, whenever i was alone, i'd pick up the guitar and fool around. now i probably play about a tenth of what i used to, maybe even less. i used to play so frequently that any idea i had during the day would be quickly set to music, and i'd pick the guitar up again before it was forgotten. now the guitar playing is so infrequent that that's rarely the case.

but that can't be completely it. i also had trouble sleeping on my mission, so i'd find myself in a comparable situation. i'd be up in the middle of the night with no guitar and someone asleep in the next room. my mission was probably the most prolific of my songwriting days, even if most of the songs sucked. all i had to write on was a crappy 45-ish key keyboard with the volume all the way down, and half the time i didn't even use that. so i really have no excuse there.

there is something else to the marriage thing. that automatically makes any love song about my wife, even if it isn't. not that i'm writing love songs about other people, but rather i'm writing love songs about no one at all, and that's what i've always done. my songs are not autobiographical. but all of a sudden there's this person that's gonna get pinned with all the lyrics of anything i write, whether they're good or bad. i don't know if this bothers me much right now, but it used to. i kind of trust that kari's a smart enough person to figure this kind of thing out, but it's still shaky ground. i mean, song writing is one of the few arts where it's almost always assumed to be autobiographical. i could go on, but i won't.

another thing could be that i'm just not reading and writing as much as i used to. i mean, i switched to a science major, and that's a lot less inspiring than the english classes i used to take. it also means i have a lot less spare time to read. as far as writing goes...i don't know, i guess mostly it was all just communicating with people on the internet. that seems to have slowed down a lot, mostly because nobody uses instant messenger and everybody uses facebook. i think facebook is fine for staying in touch with people, but i don't think it's very good at all as a means of everyday communication. and for that reason, i rarely use it for anything other than just to change my status. and thus the writing declines. so i guess the main point of all this is that i'm distancing myself from constantly processing words. i just don't think about them or play with them as much. thanks to that i don't think or interesting words, or double meanings, or rhymes, or whatever else makes lyrics different from anything else.

it could also be cuz of this dang computer. i've become a pro at wasting time on the internet. seriously wasting time. like, i'll sit down for a couple hours and have nothing to show for it, and half the time i won't even remember what sites i've been to. it's pretty lame. if i dedicated that time to playing music, or even reading and writing, i'd get so much more out of it. i tell myself i have to time because of school work, but, honestly, if i just lost my internet connection, i'd have more time than i could figure out what to do with.

i guess that's enough. is that enough? yeah, i guess it's probably more than anyone even cares about. so maybe i'll figure this all out at some point. watch out, the world, because i'm ready to rock.