The one where I tell you what I dreamed last night

(Pre-script: To recieve the full benefits this post has to offer, you'll need to read it as the song" Good Intentions" by Toad the Wet Sprocket, plays. Go down to the playlist, click on that particular song, then come back and resume reading. I'll wait...) (...still waiting...)

This morning, I was blasting through space* when in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, my dream from last night returned to my full conscious memory. And then I thought, "Wow, how about that?" So I thought I would share it here, today, with all y'all, my peeps, gentle readers that you are, even those of you who are imaginary...(It wouldn't be my FIRST encounter with imaginary friends...But I digress...)

I dreamed that I woke up on the morning after the Presidential Election, opened the newspaper**, and read that the person who won was someone that I had never heard of, from some obscure party which I had also never heard of. The new Presidential Elect did not have any distinguishable characteristics that I remember; that wasn't important in the dream. The important part was simply the fact that some unexpected and previously unknown person had won, and what a surprise that was! I did not react to this news with fear or anxiety or disappointment. In my dream, I was just really surprised more than anything, and probably fascinated, in a "well, would you look at that!" sort of way.

Feel free to interpret this dream however you want. You might be wrong, but feel free to interpret it, anyway. Before you analyze, let me give you some guidelines for dream interpretation that I know from having researched the subject extensively about 14 years ago for a paper I had to write. Since I got an A on the paper, I now concider myself a Dream Analysis Expert and am going to add that to my profile as soon as I am done writing this.

Remember that when you analyze dreams, what is important is the feelings involved in the dream, more so than what is happening***. You can learn a lot about yourself by writing down your dreams in the morning, too. You will find that every night, there is a theme in all of your 3-5 dreams that night, which is sometimes hard to pull out...but if you are serious about it, you can really learn a lot about yourself from your dreams. You can actually do a lot of personal therapy this way, too. I experienced this personally 14 years ago, when I started writing down my dreams. I realized that there were certain things that were always happening in my dreams that I had not noticed before. For example, I tended to dream about:

1.falling into the ocean,

2.losing my shoes,

and

3.people getting mad at me.

When I saw these constant themes, I realized some things I won't share here, except for:

#3."Oh, I have a fear that people are always going to get mad at me."

And guess what, once I had that epiphany, I stopped having the angry people dreams. See, free therapy you can try on yourself. It's like your unconscious mind throws up into your dreams, and it's up to you to sort it out...or not. You could just stick to living an unconscious life. It's really up to you.

Really, you are probably better at analyzing your own dreams than anyone else...Unless you are like Joseph or Daniel in the Old Testament, and the ruler of the nation summons you to interpret his dream, or else he'll kill you or everyone else, and so you have to pray that God will give you the dream and the interpretation. Then you have a gift and a duty to fullfill it. But I digress...

Y'all, I can't tell you EVERYTHING I know about dreams, that would take too long; I'd have to write a book or something, and LIKE I have TIME to write a book that requires me to stay focused on only one topic for, like, 306 pages, at least.

-XOXO,

*This should actually read: I was running really fast on the treadmill.

**I don't generally read the newspaper. I sometimes sort through the Sunday paper to retrieve the TV guide and the comics for the kids, and might even read an article if it catches my eye, but again, that's only on Sunday.

***If you always dream about the same thing, then it IS important, but again, it will be the feelings associated with the events that you really want to examine.