It's 6.20 a.m. here in the morning and I just woke up from a dream--haha, don't worry not a nightmare! It was bizarre yet I was able to make sense out of it. And amazing cos' I actually remember it quite vividly. It feels like I'm in one of those experiments where they get you to sleep in the lab, very uncomfortably linked to EEG machines so that they can measure the brain activity going on as you shift through various stages of sleep, and then they wake you up at a certain point and get you to relate whatever dream content that you just experienced in your sleep. I suppose that's the only way to preserve memories of dreams--to wake you and record it immediately.
The dream made sense to me because I see many elements of it comprise thoughts that ran through my mind in the preceding day. Somewhat a manifestation of the Activation-Synthesis Theory regarding dreams that I learnt in my Psych 101 text--I really liked the chapter on dreams; it was fascinating how Freud purported that specific images in your dream (e.g., a horse) reflected certain unwanted contents (e.g., a horse would symbolize sex) that were anxiety-provoking if they found their way constantly into your conscious mind and a defense mechanism that your brain employed was to repress it (that's when it could potentially seep into your dreams). Ha Ha, I don't buy that, but I do admire his creativity and how perceptive he is as a psychotherapist. Despite his controversies, I think he is a brilliant psychologist who was very much influenced by the cultures of his time.
The Activation-Synthesis Theory, which appears to be more scientific, seems to hold a premise that sounds suspiciously similar to what we say in Mandarin about "ri you suo xi, ye you suo meng" (idioms possess a lot of investigative value in the social sciences realm haha). Basically, scientists noticed that the brain discharges some electrical activity in the night as one sleeps, and it appears to be very random. And one theory says that it could be processing and rearranging the thought material located in the different areas in our brain. It's interesting because there are various sensing organs located in your brain and sometimes when you perceive something in your sleep (e.g., you are falling down a great height), I think (and I emphasize that this is my presumption) that the vestibular area in the brain stem that is responsible for the function of coordination and balance is activated in your sleep. It's been a while since I took Psych 101 so everything I'm espousing now is really based on my memory of what I learnt from Zimbardo (not the man himself--I wish--just the textbook he edited). But I did read it back forth several times!
Oh man, how did I get into such a long discourse about my sleep? I think I really need to put a disclaimer in my posting title. This is really very random stuff. Okay, so here goes the dream (which I must clarify should not be interpreted as having any particular meaning--it's just a mishmash of various things, both important and inconsequential, that probably went through my mind recently).
So the context of the dream goes like this. I got into a police car (I think it should be a Singapore one--haha, if you didn't know where I used to work you would probably think I was arrested for something), and this may sound a bit moribund but it felt as though there was something to be mourned for (again, this is not prophetic, just a meaningless jumble of stuff). Obviously, someone I know, who is a cop-friend of mine (which I'm not going to reveal cos' I wanna leave you guessing haha), was driving the car. In my hand was a bunch of weed-like plants that I must have plucked from somewhere before I left. As we drove (I think it was day before it gradually became night), I opened the window to the police car (haha, I'll never be able to do what I did in reality--neither can anyone else!) and started to dump the weeds a couple at a time into a plot of the same kind of weed or grass that ran along the road that we were traveling along. The plot was sloping towards my direction so as I threw subsets of what I gathered earlier onto the plot, I could give a quick glance of the weeds that I flung lying there on the ground--the car was traveling slow enough.
It gradually became dark and apparently the bunch of weeds that I gathered had some kind of flies residing in it and I kinda released the flies into the police car (this is when it starts to take on a movie-like quality haha--I can even remember what the flies resemble!). I was horrified cos' this is not something you want to happen when you are sitting in someone else's car, and your own of course, but this was a police car! Worse, the flies began to emit some substance that solidified into something that looked like a slice of desiccated beehive that was the size of a pencil-case. But somehow I was quite certain that it was made of cinnamon. And they just started multiplying and flying around in the car with that thing attached to them. I began to shoo them out of the window or swat them in the car. Some were smashed against the window and that was a gross sight which I shan't describe. I remember being very apologetic throughout and my friend was very kind in assuring me. We were driving along the PIE towards Bukit Batok then.
Just when we managed to kill or release all the flies that arose, new ones that were more ferocious appeared (they didn't have funny faces or stings, they just looked like some kind of ordinary flies with nice, leaf-shaped wings). And they multiplied again and we resumed the shooing and swatting. There were some other details that I can't recall now. Soon after, the dream just ended and I woke up peacefully from my sleep.
As I reflect on that dream, I recognize some elements which were things that either went through my mind very briefly, or were talked about in the day before. The cinnamon part must have came about because I've been eating some apple cinnamon cereal bars recently. The flies probably came about because my prof was talking about mosquitoes and how they transmit Malaria during one of my classes. The police car might have came about because I was telling some new people I met yesterday about my previous job and I clearly remembered thinking about a police car when I gave my reply. And just to wrap it up, I was reading my textbook on PTSD and here was this section on how they measured brain waves in sleep and compared this outcome between combat veterans stricken with PTSD and their healthy counterparts. Ha Ha, psychologists are always so inclined to analyze what they experience...and that's how they derive hypotheses and design good research studies to support their conjectures.
It's 7.30 am now. Time to stop and decide whether I should go back to bed. The weather in NYC took a drastic change and now its getting really cold. Time to bring out all the sweaters and coats!
~Ciao
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