Читать книгу Freaky Dreams - Adele Nozedar - Страница 4

I dreamed I was in the kitchen making a sandwich.

It was the weirdest dream I’ve ever had.

When I started researching this book, I asked people to tell me about their dreams; specifically, I was after the weirdest, the freakiest, the most disjointed examples, the ones that really do defy analysis. And the two-line quote above, was possibly one of the oddest.

It seems odd because it’s so normal.

After all, it’s in the nature of a dream that it’s weird and freaky. If you’re describing a dream to someone, is it likely that you’d ever say, “Oh my, I’ve got to tell you about the REALLY NORMAL dream I had last night!”? Nope!

Despite centuries of research that’s still continuing, there’s still so much about dreams, and indeed sleep, which remains a mystery.

Mankind has traveled into the deepest depths of the oceans. We’ve set foot on the moon. We’ve sent probes to pick up pebbles from Mars, and we’ve taken photographs in the unfathomable vastness of space. And yet we still don’t know quite what happens, or where we go to, every night when we toddle off to bed, close our eyes, and sleep.

For example, here’s something that’s very puzzling.

If you’ve ever watched someone sleeping, you might have noticed their eyeballs moving swiftly back and forth under the lids. This is called Rapid Eye Movement (REM), and it happens when the sleeper is dreaming. Dreams are our way of processing the events of the day, incidents in our lives, and all sorts of physical and philosophical phenomena.

The duck-billed platypus, of all animals on earth, shows the most extreme incidence of REM.

What is the platypus processing? What sort of anxieties could exist in that little platypus mind? We’ll never know. Another mystery. In fact, to be fair, scientists aren’t even certain that the platypus is even dreaming.

BUT WHAT IF IT IS?

The great thing about dreams is that anything can happen, any kind of surreal scenario is allowed to play out, no holds barred. In your dream world, you can be a superhero or a god, an animal, a tramp, a teapot. Dreams allow us to tap into an internal imaginary world that is as vast as that external universe that the space probes poke around in. The possibility of a fabulous dream is enough to make bedtime seem like a really fun proposition.