January 31, 2005

• Gods I haven’t been so sick since I was a kid. I had the flu yesterday… a gift from my infant nephew. Everyone in the house was sick, except my mother, which is odd because she’s usually the first one to come down with something and I don’t usually get sick at all. I was so sick that I even dreamed I was sick. I forgot every other detail of the dream but for that detail while I wavered in and out of consciousness. I weighed myself today and I lost five pounds. That’s one, rather unpleasant and extreme, way to diet.

  
  

  Last night I dreamed of superheroes. Whenever there was trouble, the main superhero would take a female superhero and a powerless superhero and go off to do battle. Inevitably he would end up marrying the female superhero and the powerless superhero would tragically die at the hands of whatever villain they were fighting.

  
  

  Apparently, the powerless superhero decided enough was enough and faked his “tragic death” so that he could retire without the group dragging him back in and eventually getting him killed. So he took to wondering and eventually passed by a poorly kept Gothic mansion. There were tarps up over some of the turrets and the lawn was mostly dry yellowed sod, mud, and gravel.

  
  

  He walked around the building, considering whether he might be able to find a room. As he reached the front of the building, he found a “for sale” sign in the window. When he went inside however, he found that the building was under renovation from a student group. He was told that if he paid for the students to complete the renovations and decorating as part of their project, the house would be his.

  
  

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  There are a few myths about dreaming that I’ve always thought were interesting. One is that most people dream in black & white, or only occassionally in color. I’ve always dreamed in color. I don’t ever recall having dreamed in black and white.

  
  

  The other myth is that you know that you’re dreaming if you try to read something and can’t. I’ve never had that problem either. In some dreams I’ve read things without comprehending the actual words… I just knew what the content was by looking at it. In others, I’ve been able to see exactly what was printed. However, the simpler the message, the easier it is to comprehend. And I wonder, in the case of the dream above whether I read the “For Sale” sign or comprehended it as a symbol of sale. That may be the key to written word comprehension in the dream state. The fact that I comprehend words (not just the sale sign) as symbols (in the waking world) may be why I am mostly able to read in dreams.

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