As life gets busy, my dreams get crazy.  It’s an entertaining relationship, because even when I wake up tired, I never wake up bored.

A few nights ago, dreamland included a serial killer in a sauna.  Last night, I was madly trying to find something to wear to a wedding.  Wait a minute, isn’t my roommate getting married on Sunday?  Hmm.

Even though looking for clothes might not sound interesting to you, it was of vital importance in dreamland.  The first option I found was a black skirt that was roughly four times as wide as my body.  After that was rigged to not fall off, I found three pieces of clothing that were different shades of shimmery green.  A few minutes with those items left me looking like a shiny beetle.  I couldn’t tell if it was getting better or worse.  It had to be better than arriving in shorts and a t-shirt, right?

Then dream me really hit gold by remembering that I had picked up my dry cleaning that day, and it was in my car.  There had to be something good in there.  (I did in fact pick up my dry cleaning yesterday.)  I’m pretty sure I didn’t settle the issue at all and just ended up magically in someone else’s car for a ride to wherever we were going.  When we started talking (typical “I’ve never met you” conversation), I woke up.  Dang it.  Getting to know imaginary people is way more fun than rigging imaginary giant skirts and looking for clean laundry.

Why does your subconscious choose to remember some things about the day or life and totally ignore others?  Questions like this bring me back to yesterday’s post about loving school.  I wish I could have found the time to major in a few extra things in college.  I could have added some psychology and neuroscience to the mix, and I would know exactly why my brain mulls over laundry all night long.  Instead, I learned how to analyze a painting or a graph of supply and demand.  Man, I’m prepared for life!

(If there were a textbook about economics in dreams, I imagine it would have examples like this: “When dream character X has an atypical need for clothing Y, the subconscious behaves irrationally and problems become disproportionate to real needs.  Typical charts of supply and demand no longer apply; dream demand is not within the realm of known economic theory.”  It would be a short textbook.)

[Photo courtesy of WestLothian.]