Thursday, January 7, 2010

Volume 3, Number 19: Dreams and Parallel Universes

(Note: I originally posted this entry on June 8, 2008 on my Yahoo! GeoCities blog.)

Recently, I came across an unusual idea: That when people have dreams, they may in fact be "tuning into"--or even travelling to--a parallel universe. I found it in someone's blog, but there are numerous web sites that discuss this idea as well, like this one.

That just fascinated me, because I've had dreams where not only was my father alive, but everyone else in the dream acted like he never died (he died in 1994, may he continue to rest in peace). Dreams like those definitely fit the theory, and I certainly would like to have more dreams like that.

However, not all of my dreams fit that theory well at all. I have had some very odd dreams that don't appear to take place in any parallel universe at all.

Take, for example, dream I had a month or two ago, the one where Gordon Ramsay and I revisit the Seascape Inn in Islip, New York. In that dream, we discovered that Doug (the lazy, dirty "head chef") had returned, and we urged the new owners of the restaurant to verify everything on Doug's resume, at which point Doug fled (yea!). Later on in the dream, we met with the previous owners (Peter and Irene) in the dining room, and Irene asked me if it was a new tradition for an ocean liner to pass by the restaurant, at which point we saw one such ship breaking through the parking lot and colliding with the restaurant. Wait, it got even weirder. The restaurant started to sink like it's another ship. No, wait, the weirdness wasn't done yet. The restaurant was sinking at such a list that some people needed to climb a rope tied to a railing, only there wasn't a rope, so I had to fashion one out of one of those industrial-sized rolls of bubblewrap (we had to twist the bubblewrap as it come off the roll to make it into a "rope"--what one of those was doing in a restaurant, I'll never know).

Another odd dream I had was the one last year where I find secret passageways to otherwise unknown rooms in my house (I mentioned it in this blog entry). That was just surreal.

Then there's the one I had, around 13 years ago, took root as the result of falling asleep with the television on. I was watching some PBS documentary (either Nova or Frontline) and fell asleep in the middle of it. Next thing I know, I'm sitting in an auditorium at the Chemistry Building at the University of Michigan, attending a lecture, only the lecture's being given by none other than Barney the Dinosaur.

Wait, it got weirder. Barney's giving a lecture on fire safety, as opposed to, say, chemistry or economics. No--wait--it got even weirder. Barney approached me with a fire hose, saying that I was on fire, even though I wasn't (he was pretending I was, apparently) and had just begun to douse me with the hose when I woke up... and gosh darn it, Barney and Friends was on.

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