Dream

A brief preface: If this blog turns into a "here's what happened in my sleep" dream journal, then please, please punch me in the genitalia. You don't want to read it, I don't want to write it. That genre of blogging would be in the neighborhood of rock bottom for TheNinjaDon.

That said, I had a remarkable dream a few nights ago, and damnitall I'm going to write about the experience. So there.

There is a lot of storyline that I remember - a rarity for me - but that would be flirting with dream-journalism, so we'll gloss over those details. Instead, we'll pick up the dream where it gets interesting:

Amidst my adventurous goings-on, I realized that my friend Megan was missing, so I drove into the bad part of town to find her. The signs were all in Spanish, and I distinctly remember calling it Little Havana [are my dreams racist?].

Megan was standing in the road, next to Horatio from CSI: Miami (who, fortunately, never had opportunity to make a clever one-liner). I stopped the car - a 70s Cadillac pimp-mobile - a few dozen yards away, turned it off, and got out.

That's when the gunfire started, from the boarded up windows of an abandoned building [it really is a shame, the socioeconomic depression in the Little Havana in my subconscious]. I ducked for cover behind the car, but Megan was pinned down in the open, stranded in the middle of the street.

She used Horatio's body as a make-shift shield, and was screaming at me to drive to her. Crouched behind the Cadillac, I tried to get the keys out of my pocket, but they were stuck.

They were stuck.

They were stuck!

It was at this point that I awoke. It was after 4am, and my heart was racing. This kind of heart rate usually follows a hard effort up a hill, and each beat pounded in my ears.

Now here is where it gets really weird, so I'll recount it as accurately and without embellishment as possible:

Still half asleep, I thought back to what had woken me up. I couldn't get the keys out of my pocket. It woke me up. If I go back to sleep, I still won't be able to get the keys out of my pocket. I should fool myself. So I reached into my empty pajama pocket, grabbed at nothing, and pulled my hand out. My heart rate had slowed. I went to sleep.

Now I was sitting in the car, the motor running. I drove between Megan and the building, and she dove into the back seat. I sped away.

End of dream.

It is weird to me that I diagnosed a sticking point in the dream, and weirder that I devised a remedy in the form of self-deceit. It is weirdest that the remedy worked, but it is much weirdest-er that when I did resume dreaming, I resumed the exact same narrative, but had skipped a few steps.

Was I awake so briefly that the neural activity that had created the dream was still "cued" in my gray matter? Did the dream progress because the dream-related neural pattern had progressed in parallel, and independent of, my conscious thoughts? Had I not physically performed the act of removing (imaginary) keys from my (empty) pocket, would I have resumed the loop of stuck keys? Why did I remember this dream so much more vividly than any other dreams?

I therefore draw the following two conclusions:

1. Neuropsychology is rich and fascinating
2. I watch too much television