‘You Won’t Believe Who Was in My Dream Last Night…’
You’re late for a train, destination – airport, and you’ve left your bag at home. You wake up sweating, heart racing having just engaged in fisty cuffs with the train driver who refused to wait while you ran back to get your bag. You fall out of bed, fly downstairs to your flatmate and blurt out the ordeal you just endured, only to be met with a weak smile and an ‘oh, shit man, you cool?’ before she turns back to her breakfast eggs and Ru Paul.
It’s a universally unspoken truth that when you’re not in them, dreams are boring. The excitement you feel while in it far outweighs that of the audio version. Our subconscious is the rubbish tip where all our filthy and psychotic thoughts get dumped and for some reason, we employ our friends and family as the Refuse Collectors. We know they aren’t real, so why do we have the impulse to tell people our dreams?
Our ancestors experienced the same anxiety dreams and had a practical reason for it. Threat Simulation Theory explains how our dreams are basically like ‘The Construct’ from The Matrix. In them, we play out having to escape danger in order to train ourselves for the real-life version. Avoiding being mauled by a bear is now a bit of an obsolete skill, but this in-built defence mechanism is still useful for processing the day’s emotional threats. Speaking about our dreams might bring clarity and in some circumstances, an answer to a problem we never knew we had. I would love to know what deep seated issue caused me to dream of a threesome with Nicki Minaj and Han Solo.
Whether it’s betraying a mate or having (horrifically good) sex with the antichrist, recounting inappropriate dreams could be a type of confession… You can thank God all you like that it was ‘just a dream’, but the guilt that comes with murdering your mother the previous night isn’t easy to shrug off. Admitting this out loud is cathartic! On the other side, there’s recounting the dream in the hopes it will come true. Surely if I tell someone how Jacob Elordi tied my shoelaces one autumn night in Mexico, it’ll happen one day. At the very least I’d be labelled a soothsayer.
The most invasive sentence to be uttered at nine in the morning: ‘you were in my dream last night.’ Oh no, what was that little perverted version of me up to this time? Telling someone you dreamt about them might be your brain’s way of disclosing buried information, like the classic, ‘a friend *cough* of mine fancies you.’ We’re pack animals and naturally want to share information, just be aware when your partner tells you they slept with someone else… in their dream, of course.
Neither science nor speculation have figured out why our brains create random, irreverent and often dangerous worlds in which we break bones and hearts, but one thing’s for certain, 98% of the time it’s fucking boring. However, that 2% could be interpreted into life changing information, so just in case, keep spewing your subconscious onto unsuspecting dinner guests, you never know, doing so might unlock the secret to life, or at the very least, how to fight a bear. ..