Disjointed dreaming

Just the other day I overheard three girls talking about dreams. One of them told the other that zinc deficiency can cause people to forget their dreams, and may even hinder people from dreaming. When I opened my email inbox that day, a message my friend had forwarded caught my eye. One sentence read, " Did you know that the more you dream, the higher your IQ?" I thought to myself, "Bloody marvelous. The reason I've had trouble dreaming is due to a dearth of zinc in my diet... But wait. Am I supposed to be stupid because I rarely dream?"And off I went, babbling to myself.

The thing is, I used to think that an absence of dreams was a good thing. Most of my dreams are not the transcendental type that make people euphoric upon waking. My dreams are usually nothing short of terrifying. I dream of dystopic settings, amputated limbs, serial killers, weirdly intelligent crocodiles, and odious monsters. At other times I dream surreal dreams in which impossible things happen which cannot be reconciled to any nascent reality in my consciousness.

However, recent events have made me realize that dreams are important and, although they should sometimes be taken with a grain of salt, their value in showing people the subconscious self should never be discounted. Dreams reveal to us the things we refuse to acknowledge while awake; they show us different perspectives that we would never have thought of in a mundane frame of mind. They also give new insights to who we are, and who we might become presently. Occasionally, for some people, they are prophetic.

I really regret the loss of all those forgotten dreams, never to be retrieved, never to be reconciled with the dreamer, never to be written down, never to be spoken about. There is something about dreams that makes their existence so fragile, like that of mirages that rise and fade in the mind's eye; one never knows if they are material, if one ever saw them at all, or if they were merely a shimmer of light in the intensely arid desert. Sometimes, waking up from a bad dream gives more validity to existence than a dreamless slumber, and the horror of a dream is offset by the inexplicable feeling of being alive. In the end, I will try to keep my dreams intact, if only to alleviate the numbness I get from not dreaming, if only to remove myself from the commonplace demands and drudgeries of the world, if only to make myself a place in a world far removed from what I know.

But please have mercy and don't make me dream of the Brurats Show.