Dream

Have you ever wondered how you manage to create the worlds you dream in?

Think about it. Do you personally have enough knowledge to create an entire world? Do you know how electronics work? How the wires in your house are connected? Do you know how a gun works? Probably not, but that doesn't stop the TV in your dream from turning on and displaying something. It doesn't stop the lights from coming on when you flip the switch. It doesn't stop the gun from firing if you pull the trigger.

I had a dream once where I somehow got my hands on an M16. I personally have no idea what the inside of an M16 rifle looks like, but I still saw something when I took it apart. How did my mind know what to fill in there? Did it "instantly invent" something to put in the place of something unknown?

I've been reading about lucid dreaming, the skill of being able to recognize and control your dreams, for a short time. I personally have never had to do anything special to control my dreams, it's just something I've always been able to do. That may be the reason I don't have nightmares often (I can't remember my last one, so it must not have been very bad), as soon as I realize I'm dreaming, it's game over for whatever was scaring me. This is my dream, fool. *poof* Nightmare's over. During normal dreams I don't always realize I'm dreaming, though, something has to happen to let me know. Usually something happens that I know couldn't happen in the real world, or something has to change, or be different than I know its real-world counterpart is.

Speaking of that, why do things in our dreams appear different than they are in the real world? If we have knowledge of something, take the room you're in right now for example, why would we see it differently in a dream? I had a dream where I was in my old middle school, but doors didn't lead to the right places. I could go through the door to the math classroom and end up in the library. I know that this isn't right, so why did my mind make it this way in my dream? If I realize it's wrong, why isn't it right? What was even stranger about the doors leading to the wrong place was that in order for the places they took me to to exist, large pieces of the dream world would have to intersect. The math room the door should have taken me to is only as big as a normal classroom, but the library I ended up in was much, much wider than the space it had to exist in. If I were to punch a hole in a piece of the wall that shouldn't have space to exist, where would the hole lead? Would it open up to a place outside where the library should be, or would I end up in the extra space the wrongfully placed library was taking up? Say the hole lead to a place outside where the library should have been. If I crawled out, and walked back to the door to the math room, would the "wrong" library's hole be there? Inversely, if I punched the hole and then ran to the real library, would the hole appear there? Would the two be linked? Would the door in the library that was connected to the door in the hallway that should have lead to the math room take me to the math room instead of the hallway?

Going into even more detail, what would happen if I picked up a book I had never seen before and started reading? Would my brain write an entire book on the fly? God, there's so much to wonder about.

Do we have different types of dreams? I sometimes have dreams that are totally surreal, and yet other times I have dreams that follow the rules of reality totally. There are also various elements that reoccur in my dreams from time to time. A place, an object, a person, etc. My memories of these things are constant and valid from dream to dream.

There's a place I like to call "nowhere" that I find myself in sometimes. It's a giant mansion looking place where doors lead to various places from the real world. The doors always lead to the same place each time I have the dream. I remember enough about this dream world to remember where the doors lead, and to remember which doors are locked. The first thing I do when I realize I'm having this dream is run to all the locked doors and check for any that have become unlocked. Newly unlocked doors always lead to places that I've just recently been to. The latest door to unlock was the back room in the Rack Room shoe store. I walked back there to throw something in the trash can when I was out getting new shoes. Strange that insignificant places like that get their own door in my "nowhere" world.

I have many more thoughts on this topic, but I don't want to make this so long as so people don't bother to read it.