The Dream Of Having Total Recall Of A Dream

                                             PPG Place in downtown Pittsburgh

Woke up from a bizarre series of dreams in the middle of the night and for the life of me couldn't put a finger on a one of them when I crawled out of bed this morning.

Not that I place much credence in the content of dreams. Some people believe dreams are a trunk-line to the subconscious, revelations of the unconscious, hidden desires, or Freudian wish fulfillment. I'm more inclined to side with the researchers who posit that dreaming is a function of memory, either as a consolidation mechanism or as a selection/suppression process.

Whenever I have particularly active dreams I always inventory what it was I ate, drank, read or watched the day before. Yesterday I ate two different bowls of soup (Tortilla soup for lunch, beef and bean for dinner), drank two glasses of a fairly plain red table wine, and had a snack of hummus with multi-grain crackers. I watched the Lakers/Hornets game, and read a somewhat dull John Steinbeck short story, A Snake of One's Own. 

Not much in terms of stimulation of the senses there.

A habit I developed a few decades ago is keeping a notepad and pen on the nightstand in order to write down any dreams that might wake me in the middle of the night.

This is not an original idea of mine - it was related to me by Thibs in the late '80's and he had gotten the idea from someone else.

That is supposed to help fill out the faint memory of whatever it was that the dream consisted of, and hopefully save any wonderful ideas or creative thoughts.

A few of the things I've written down at 3am I have fleshed out and posted on this blog. 

However, I often end up looking at the notes in the morning and it's just nonsense like "Where is the Einstein of Dogs?" and "Julius Caesar was a poor dancer" scrawled in barely legible cursive script.

There was no notepad on the nightstand last night, so I didn't take down any notes. The only thing I could recall about the dreams when I woke this morning was that there was something having to do with sprint car racing and the statue of Nick Venetucci in Colorado Springs.

Maybe I should cut back on the soup.