on the use of dreams

One of the things I've really missed as I've been recovering is dreaming. I've always had a rather vivid dreaming life--full color, sometimes long narratives, sometimes dreams that continue on from dreams I've had in the past. So when all my dreams abruptly disappeared down a black hole about two months ago I was rather disappointed. It's that tumor again, obviously. Sometimes I would get the sense that there had been something, but I couldn't remember any of it.

Which is a shame, because my real-life dreams have always done quite a lot of work for me. Of course, sometimes I would have these dreams that just seemed so important, where I'd wake up in the middle of the night and shout to myself, "I have to remember this!" And I would write it all down, only to read it in the morning and think, "Uh, what?"

These are not the fun dreams, though. These are the kinds of dreams I hate--the kind where your brain keeps working on some tedious problem from work and you don't really feel rested at all the next day.

But other times I've had dreams that made serious connections for me or that even offered interpretations of things that were worrying me in real life. That dream/vision/whatever-it-was that I had in the MRI back in early December is such an example.

So when my dreams disappeared I really noticed it, and it was a bit upsetting, like something that makes me particularly me was gone. I wasn't sure if I was just not remembering my dreams--I told myself that maybe I was still having them, but just not remembering them very well. But that's not what it felt like. It felt like the image-making part of my brain was just not making images anymore.

And I'm thinking in retrospect that that might indeed have been the case. Certainly the experience of noticing my dreams coming back again would seem to confirm that they just weren't there for a while. The first thing that came back was the sense that I'd dreamed something, even though I couldn't remember it. I hadn't even had that before. A few days later I started remembering fragmentary images. Now I'm remembering entire narratives.

And go figure: they're architectural dreams again--dreams about exploring houses and looking in rooms that are normally closed off and full of spiderwebs and antique furniture and other oddities.

This must be my own brain's favorite metaphor. It seems to like architecture a lot.

Thank goodness it doesn't seem to go for bogeymen too much. That would really suck, wouldn't it?