Last night I dreamt I was with somebody else. It was not somebody I know, just somebody else. I couldn’t help thinking about the “psychological immune system” we sometimes talked about when he was preparing a reading by Daniel Gilbert for his students. Is it possible that just now my system recognizes that it is inevitably over and promptly activates itself to overcome the moment of grief?
I don’t believe in dreams as bearers of signals of any kind. However, in times of distress I sometimes had weird dreams that I still remember (probably because I explained them to other people and they were the object of some debate). The last one came when I was about to leave the country I was living in and return to my home city, in a moment loaded with emotional as well as work stress. I dreamt that I was walking along my parents’ street when an elephant (!) sat on me, squashing me against a fence. Out of nowhere, my first boyfriend –the one I had when I was in high school and in my first university years, the one I haven’t seen since we broke up more than 12 years ago– was there, and he helped me to come out from under the elephant…
In a farther past, in older times of confusion and sadness, rings, glasses and an helicopter (!) also appeared in my dreams. I then tried to make sense of them –googling the words to find out their meaning in dreams– but mostly without success (they can always mean many things, both good, bad, and even reeeeaaally baaad).
Now I think that dreams are just part of the maintenance work our brains do at nights. When we remember them –for example because the clock or any other noise disrupted our sleep– it’s similar to when we enter a cafeteria before they open, with the sleepy waiter still cleaning the tables and warming up the coffee machine. Just the necessary adjustments to start a new day.
Of course, some days –for example, after a stormy night has left its traces of rainwater and wet leaves all over the place, maybe even a broken glass caused by the effect of the furious wind– the “adjustments” need to be bigger… at times reaching pachydermic dimensions…
plusdexcuses 