Understanding Dreams

The Secret World
of Sleep by
Penelope Lewis

Recently I listened to an interesting interview about the function of sleep in people.  The interview was with Penelope Lewis, a neuroscientist who recently wrote the book The Secret World of Sleep: The Surprising Science of the Mind at Rest.  The discussion included sleep's effect on memory, depression, and talks about the significance of dreams.  I highly recommend you listen to it or at least read the synopsis.

Dreams Can be Weird

Around the same time I heard this interview, my wife Ashly had what can only be described as an interesting dream.  My dreams can sometimes be strange, but they are generally vague.  Something weird might happen, but I don't usually remember (or I may not think about it at all in the dream) the details.  My wife, on the other hand, tends to remember most of the details of her dreams.  She describes some of her dreams to me, and I can't help but think "How do you remember all that?"  It is more than likely to do with the way our brains work, me an engineer, and her a musician.

For posterity's sake, as well as sharing an amusing dream with the world, I took notes on her dream soon after she had it.  From there I have expanded it into a full write-up.  I will warn you, parts of the dream are rather disturbing, so if you are put off by blood and human flesh and animals trampling people, go no further.  Without further ado, I now present to you,

A hypnogram displaying the average pattern the human
mind takes during the course of sleeping.
CC image originally created by RazerM on Wikipedia.

Ashly's Dream

UPDATE: My wife has informed me that the information about the deli was not 100% correct.  'Human' has been corrected to 'American.'

+Ashly Vallimont, some of my friends from my hometown, and I decided to visit an amusement park, one that happened to be set up like an Ikea and co-operated by Russia and North Korea.  One of my friends wanted to go see the granite exhibit at this amusement park, so my friends and I took the clockwise route to the left, while Ashly went to the right, thinking her trip would be shorter since the granite exhibit was in the back-right corner of the park.

On her way to the granite exhibit, Ashly came across a deli, so she stopped in for a bite to eat.  It was then that she realized that all the meat at the deli was actually American flesh, and all the drinks had American blood added to them, Americans being the most delicious of all the nationalities (presumably due to the high fat content).  Being disgusted by this deli of horrors, Ashly left the deli, only to run into a large elephant in the street.  This elephant, which apparently looked evil (not sure what an evil elephant looks like), was chowing down on some human skin shaped into the form of a person in the middle of the road.

Now I know what an evil elephant looks like.
Drawing courtesy of +Odai Athamneh.

Shocked, Ashly quickly passed the evil elephant and immediately came across an elephant exhibit containing three fully tusked, starving, baby elephants.  Curious, Ashly looked into the exhibit to try to figure out what was going on, when a gate leading into the exhibit opened and in ran three small children, maybe three years old.  Before she knew it, the elephants trampled the children and ripped them to shreds.  Not enjoying the exhibit very much, she decided to leave and head towards the granite exhibit again.

Because of all the elephant-related delays, my friends and I were already there by the time Ashly arrived.  Upon arrival, Ashly saw Geoff demonstrating how light and porous granite is, lifting an SUV-sized hunk of granite over his head with little effort.  He then showed that with the addition of just a small amount of water, the granite became the heaviest thing known to man, crushing everything underneath it.  This fascinated Geoff.  At the same time Geoff was performing this demonstration for us, Dean was throwing balls at Geoff's head and laughing.  Finally we all had enough of the exhibit and decided to leave the park.

On the way out, a  message is played over the loudspeaker announcing that the Russian and North Korean governments have decided that if any park visitors were born in three of the Hawaiian Islands, they must be put to death immediately.  My friend Jason, who I can assure you was not born in Hawaii in real life, was a Hawaiian native in this dream.  Predictably, all the park visitors started running for the exits.

For some reason, we were suddenly in a weird, all white, zigzag hallway.  Ashly noticed that the government officials are only grabbing the people who are running, so she decided to walk, even though the rest of the group, me included, are running.  Even though she was walking, Ashly got stopped anyway and the officials demanded her ID.  She complies, though the address on her ID was not current, so she also had to provide a piece of paper that stated she had moved, which also happened to be another ID card.  Ashly ended up getting into an argument with the government officials because the second ID she produced does not have her picture on it, but her mother's.  The officials, for reasons not made clear, tried to convince Ashly to stay and make babies with them, but Ashly politely declined.  She was finally able to leave at this point.

Ashly got to the front of the building which had a lot of long lines to get out.  She noticed that there was one door with no one at it, so she headed towards it and finally left the park.  After leaving the park, Ashly headed towards where the car was parked, only to see that my friends and I were already in the car and driving towards her.  It is then that Ashly realized our son Evan Francis was in the car with us (which I can only assume means we left Evan in the car during the trip to the park).  For reasons not clear, we would not let Ashly in the car, but are quickly stopped by traffic and finally let Ashly in.

It was only as we were all in the car and driving off that I realized there is a ladder in the car that we were supposed to deliver to the Russians and North Koreans.  Ashly volunteered to take it to them and left with the ladder.  Since she needed to use the restroom at this point, Ashly stopped into a restroom only lit with red lights in the park, where she found a bunch of Hawaiians hiding in the stalls.  At this point the dream gets cloudy, but she thinks she tried to smuggle one of the Hawaiians out.  

The End

Analysis of a Dream

I think some people might see this and come to some sort of conclusion about what the dream means.  I tend to fall into the camp of dreams are weird, and often random thoughts get spliced together into nonsense and a crazy dream is born.  I find it hard to believe that my wife has some deep-seated fear of elephants, Russians and North Koreans, or thinks that either country eats human flesh or feeds it to elephants.  I also doubt that she thinks Hawaiians are being persecuted, or granite can defy the laws of physics.  Maybe I am completely wrong though.