I’m fairly certain my dreams have a drug dealer.

What is it with dreams? Sleep is supposed to be an 8-hour window (mine’s never that long) when we rest, regenerate, and arise feeling as refreshed as the person in the Folger’s commercial who throws back the covers and stretches with a smile before jumping out of bed and heading to the kitchen to commence guzzling a gallon of java.

But it’s impossible for me to feel that good or do morning gymnastics on the way to the percolator when I’ve been riding naked on a giraffe at a class reunion just moments before waking up.

The worst part is that my former classmates noticed the giraffe, but not that I was naked.

What are dreams?

There have been a lot of studies and research on the topic and I’m interested in the subject, so I read a lot about it.

I’ve yet to come across anything which has convinced me that the researchers, authors, or alleged experts, have any real answers.

In the Bible, Joseph correctly interpreted a pharaoh’s dream, and he got promoted.

If I told my boss my dreams, the men in the white coats would come get me and take me away for a vacation complete with a regimen of doctors and meds.

And why is it that some people claim to remember all of their dreams in color, while mine seem fragmented and in black and white?

Why do they get a free Technicolor movie while I get The Twilight Zone with bad reception?

And it seems that the dreams I have right before I wake up are the weirdest. Early in the night, I may dream that I’m flying through a building looking for someone I’ve never met.

Right before I wake up, the giraffe shows up and I lose my clothes.

Some of the theories I’ve read about dreams indicate they don’t have to make sense and that our brains are just purging.

But how does all that weirdness creep in?

Maybe it’s my affinity for jalapeños, Tabasco, or cookie dough ice cream.

But, I doubt it.

I think we force our brains to absorb so much, that it’s paying us back.

“Make me process hours of ‘Ancient Aliens,’ will ya? Here, have a giraffe and a class reunion, buff boy!” I can hear it saying in cranial laughter.

Another theory is that dreams are an individual’s way of problem solving, even while asleep. But most of my dreams are rarely problems I actually have, and they’re never solved during slumber.

They’re just a baffling first part of my day that I revisit as I sit in my chair at 4 a.m. and sip Folger’s while my hair still suffers from bed head.

Maybe God didn’t intend for all of us to understand our dreams. He gave that gift to very few people. I wasn’t one of them.

Dreams were central to Sigmund Freud’s work. He thought that the two parts of our dreams – what happens in them, and what those events mean – explain a lot about each of us and help relieve anxiety.

With all due respect to Mr. Freud, I receive no anxiety relief by gallivanting around on a giraffe in my birthday suit in front of friends with whom I grew up.

Maybe I should just stop trying to figure out my dreams. Because I’m definitely not paying a shrink to guess what they mean.

But let me make one thing clear: If you’re a former classmate of mine, when we see each other at the next reunion, I’ll be fully clothed and arrive in a Prius.

Unless I fall asleep.

 

©2020 John Moore

To send John a message; buy his books, Write of Passage: A Southerner’s View of Then and Now Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, or listen to his weekly John G. Moore 5-Minute Podcast; visit his website at TheCountryWriter.com.