Blogaday 10: D:Reams.

And by that I mean actual dreams, not the band that Professor Brian Cox played keyboards for.

I find dreams fascinating from two points of view. Firstly, as a psychology student; dreaming is terribly poorly understood. There are dozens of hypotheses for why humans (and animals) dream, and right now any of them could be right. The "garbage collecting process" hypothesis sounds good to me as an IT person, and it's the explanation that was most common as I was growing up, but it's falling out of favour these days. About the only common consensus is that Freud was probably wrong (but like most things in psychology even that might make a comeback). It's all linked to the question of consciousness, and that's a question that's more philosophy than science at times. Terribly, terribly deep.

Secondly, I find them fascinating because I don't do it much. Well, rather, I almost certainly do the same periods of R.E.M sleep as everyone else (2 hours total I believe) and probably do dream during that time, but I very rarely remember anything. To me I go to bed, fall asleep and wake up in the morning with nothing inbetween. Even when I do have a dream I remember - maybe a couple of times a month - they're not that exciting.

For example; from last night. I dreamt that some friends and myself were in Oban. (I have no idea why). For some reason they took a taxi from one side of the town to the other, but I decided to go round the back (by the swimming pool). I passed a tourist information sign about something called "AquaCats". What that turned out to be was a huge dumper truck with massive balloon tires that was designed to be amphibious (naming must have come from SnowCats I presume). A firm was offering trips up a huge massively steep hill in the back of this thing, which looked like good fun actually. As I'm watching, I look to my left and see Neil Gaiman with - I think - Dave Gorman.

And that's it. No appearing naked in front of huge audiences. No forgetting to take an exam. Instead I go to a town I don't really like much and see people with similar last names (both of whom are on Twitter; wonder if that's the link?) watching an amphibious dumper truck take people up a hill. One guy did fall out, but he was fine apart from getting his trousers dirty. It did look like a health and safety nightmare though.

Other people have fantastic flights of fancy, but I get slightly boring travels to Oban (there isn't any other kind, har har har, sorry Obanites). If Freud was right and dreams represent my repressed urges and desires then you'd have to stretch that dream above quite far to get to anything even vaguely worthy of repression!

Anyway. Sweet dreams folks. Enjoy them if you have them and pity those of us who don't!