Thoughts Before The Alarm Sounds

      Dreams can take us to magical places and into seemingly impossible situations. In a dream we may walk out of our front door into a new and strange, even scary, landscape. We may be transported into a strange and nightmarish land of fantasy. There appears to be no limit to the range of our dreams.       But a limit does exist. All dreams are personal, and both research and common sense indicate that one can only dream of things that one knows about. That is not to say that one needs to actually experience dizzying heights or fierce dragons, but a person who has never heard of a dragon will not dream of one.       Dreams are usually triggered by an event which has occurred while one is awake: a problem that is being worked on, a traumatic event, or even something as innocuous as a scene in a book, or a song being played in the background. While one is asleep, the mind tries not only to file the memory of th...

As I have written previously (see 8/30/09), on many mornings I partially wake up and allow “seeds” of ideas to “germinate” in my head. But it doesn’t work that way every morning. Today, for example, I was busily dreaming right through the time when I usually start to get into that “half awake, half asleep” state that I think of as my period of communication with my Muse. (The Greeks had a really odd and poetic way of putting things). Anyway, it was one of those complicated dreams that is chock full of things that are contrary to common sense. In this dream I finally did as I have done before: even though I was deep in dreamland I realized that, “This is a dream. I must wake up.” But it didn’t work. Barbara was in the dream, and I finally told her (in the dream, of course) that I was dreaming, and asked her to poke me so that I would wake up. Which she did, but it didn’t help. Finally I began to awaken, but in this in-between state, I thought that I was only dreaming that I was wa...