“Sometimes, when I’m going off to sleep,” my wife says, as we sit around the dinner table, “my brain makes up songs. Honestly, it’s like having a radio on in my head, but all the songs are mine.”
“Perhaps you should have a little recorder next to the bed,” I suggest. “Then you could just sing the songs into the recorder, you could be a really good songwriter.”
“That…” says the youngest, “would be a waste of time. This literally happened in an episode of Bob’s Burgers. They spent the whole episode trying to learn how to lucid dream so that they could capture a song they’d been dreaming, and then when they did… it was rubbish.”
…
“I’m sure your song wouldn’t be rubbish,” I say.
Everybody looks at their plates.
…
I have a strange relationship with dreams. They defy my best efforts of rational processing, which is a little aggravating. There have been times when I’ve dreamed that things have happened such as, for instance, someone dying. And then it turns out that they did in fact die while I was asleep. There must be room for coincidence, of course, but I still find it startling when that happens - as it has on more than one occasion.
I have also come up with some genuinely good ideas while asleep - I’ve never made the classic student error of putting something in an essay and footnoting ‘this came to me in a dream,’ but I have certainly had forms of words arrive in my head while sleeping that worked well for me in the waking world. On one occasion I dreamed up a very clever sounding phrase which I contained some words I didn’t understand. When I looked them up in the dictionary, I found that they did, indeed, make sense. Spooky.
At one time I grew so interested in the power of dreams that I began to learn what certain key ideas are supposed to mean when we dream them - I accidentally got too good at this. One day someone told me about a strange dream they’d had and I told them what it could mean - evidently my interpretation was too close to being accurate and as a result caused much embarrassment. I stopped doing that.
Another temporary fascination of mine, the Oglala Sioux medicine man Nicholas Black Elk once said that ‘sometimes dreams are wiser than waking’ - a phrase which has a nice ring to it. Perhaps it helped that his biographer was a poet. But in any case I think I concur.
There’s something about the way that the mind processes things behind the scenes of our consciousness which seems remarkable to me - and goes beyond my capacity to adequately explain.
…
“It’s not just the words, I make up the tunes too,” my wife says.
“That’s pretty good,” I say, encouragingly. “You should definitely try to record them somehow.
“You definitely shouldn’t,” the youngest says. “Heed the lesson of Bob’s Burgers.”
There will be no Saturday column next week (20th July).
‘Saturday columns’ are short, sometimes (relatively) funny, basically true* stories of mundanity and mishaps from my life.
*Some names, locations and other details may have been changed to protect the guilty.