Dream Salad...and Other Things...But Mostly Dream Salad

Via this blog, via google image search for "dream salad"

Dream Salad
 I have always been fascinated by dreams. Apparently most people are not? I've heard people say that dreams are the kind of things that are only interesting to the people that have them, and no one else. I disagree! I have a bad habit of asking people about their dreams, and then badgering people for ever more details until they want to kill me. If you want to talk about your dreams but are facing an unreceptive audience, get in touch with me.

Why do I love dreams so much, you ask? Well, I ask, why don't other people love dreams more? Personally, I am amazed that my unconscious mind can devise nutso scenarios that my conscious brain is not even aware of.

I started writing my dreams down in a little notebook (sporadically) this winter with mixed success. The idea is that you wake up and immediately record your dreams while they are still fresh in your mind. But I'm really lazy, so I never wake up early enough to have time to both record my dreams and get ready for work. Normally I record my dreams once I get to work. Sometimes I wait until even later in the evening. Sometimes I even put it off for a day or two. Invariably, I forget a lot of dream details. But then, dream details are almost impossible to capture in words anyway.

So today at work, I was recording a dream I had over the weekend in my little dream notebook. The dream begins with me in the cafeteria of my elementary school. I am eating a chef salad out of a beige plastic bowl (reasonable). There is iceberg lettuce, and boiled eggs, and cheese, and ham. When my dream pals and I finish up lunch, we go exploring in the school's old creepy basement (not reasonable). We open a door and unleash a dark force that can only be described as a Shadow Lion (not even sort of reasonable). The Shadow Lion chases us, and we try to hide in a library (reasonable, but my school did not have a library), the perimeter of which is entirely surrounded by a narrow catwalk (not reasonable). The Shadow Lion gets into the library and chases us around the catwalk, but it eventually gets stuck behind an obstruction on the catwalk (not logical) and my dream pals and I get away.

But I don't want to talk about fictional Shadow Lions. I want to talk about real salads. This little detail was fully elucidated when I recorded my dream today. Suddenly it occurred to me that, at some point, my elementary school actually offered salad as a an alternative to hot lunch. It was real! The long forgotten salad option!

So what happened was: I remembered something in my dream that my waking, conscious mind had forgotten! Or, in more imaginative terms: My dreams were sending me messages from my past! Or something. I don't know. But I feel like this is profound. Not the salad, exactly, but what it represents.

There are a handful of settings in which a lot of my dreams take place. Now I'm wondering if these places are actually real places (or at least representative of real places)  I went to (or saw?) as I child that I no longer consciously remember. For example, I've had a few dreams that take place in a museum with a sand sculpture and a big hour glass. Maybe I actually remember a museum with a sand sculpture and big hour glass? Which elements of my dreams are ridiculous fabrications of my mind, and which are ridiculous memories? Wow. So many new dream layers. THINK ABOUT IT.

Blogging
So. I'm starting to think that this trend of personal blogs (of which I am casually participating) is seriously the worst thing. Even I, with my amateurish, rarely updated, prefab layout-ed blog, have found myself turning disturbingly inward for blog content. Some introspection is healthy, but I think that I, at times, am partaking in lethal levels of self-involment with this blog. And I don't even include pictures of my face!

Oh, the face pictures. So many, on every post. And the staged photoshoots of, like, picnics. And bike rides. And walking down the street. I'm so confused by this. Sometimes I see pictures of bloggers crossing the street. Do they stop in the middle and ask someone to take their picture? Do they set up a tripod? In the middle of the street? I just can't imagine it, and I just wrote like 400 words on dreaming about salad!

I think that having a successful blog has the potential to change how you look at the world (in a bad way). For example, I was reading this really terrible (but popular) DIY/fashion/lifestyle blog the other day, when I came across a post titled something like "10 ways to wear a scarf." It was like: Tie it around your head! Tie it around your neck! ect, ect. You just know that the blog author, desperate for content, was putting on a scarf when and thought to herself, "Yes. That's it. This will work."

And then in the comments, all these girls are like "Wow. So inspirational. I never thought of wearing a scarf around my neck before!" But what I think they really mean (whether they know it or not) is "I never thought that you could write a fucking blog post about how to wear a scarf and publish it on an income-generating blog." Because yeah. Now that I think about it, this is really kind of brilliant.

It just seems like you'd reach a point where you'd start  experiencing the world in terms of what could potentially be, or could not potentially be, blog content. So instead of going on a whimsical picnic and then blogging about it, you go on a whimsical picnic so you can blog about it.

I am no where near that point because a.) I write one blog post a month, b.) maybe two or three people read my blog,  c.) I don't include pictures, and d.) I don't really write about the day-to-day. But it's the principal of the thing, of writing about the details of your life as though someone would want to read it.

I started writing here when I was really lonely and did not want to drive my remaining friends away with my bitching and inanities. But now I have, miraculously, managed to meet some new people and I find myself with less of a need to take my Europe stories and dumb reflections to the internet. I had pretty much resolved to delete this blog when the salad dream happened. The internet needed the salad dream.

So, I guess the blog will remain, new content pending whether or not I have additional incredible epiphanies that must be shared. But, I will never include pictures of my face. Never.