Dreams: Window to the Soul or Emotional Torture?

Have you ever gotten angry with someone for something they did…in your dreams? I don’t mean getting mad while still dreaming, but actually waking up and looking at that person and genuinely wanting to punch them in the face for what your subconscious imagined them doing during your brain’s nightly firing of neurons?

She may look docile, but she’s dreaming about using that toy spading fork to stab her enemies in the eyes.

Humans can be extremely unreasonable creatures in a great number of circumstances, but I think this may possibly be the most unreasonable reaction possible. And yet, if you’re one of many people who have had this kind of dream and experienced the aftereffects, you understand exactly what I’m talking about. You wake up and you know that it was a dream, you know that it was just your stupid brain making up weird stories with no basis in truth or reality…but you still look at that person and your body fills up with rage and you have to seriously restrain yourself from making an ass of yourself by calling them out.

I have these kinds of dreams constantly, and it can be very exhausting. I suspect that it’s a very normal thing to experience conflict and upsetting situations in dreams, but that most people forget those conflicts by the time they’ve woken up. As someone who has always had very vivid and intricate dreams – and almost always remembers them upon waking – I have to actually deal with those conflicts and the unreasonable emotion they awaken.

For example, one night not too long ago, I was dreaming that my sister-in-law and I were shopping with our daughter’s in a large and complicated mall. Sis-in-law suggested that we should get the girls tattoos and I laughed, thinking it was a joke because the girls are only 3 and 4. But then, when I turned around, sis-in-law had disappeared with both girls. I went on a frantic search through the ridiculously busy and difficult-to-navigate mall until I eventually spotted them at the food court. I relaxed for a half a moment until I saw that my daughter – my 3-year-old daughter – now had a tattoo on the back of her hand. I woke up absolutely livid, even though I know damn well that my sis-in-law would never do something so idiotic.

The human brain is wonderful at tricking itself into believing in nonsense, and I think that’s part of the problem with these kinds of dreams. There have been studies that show that people can be – quite easily, in fact – tricked into “remembering” events from their childhood that never really happened, so long as they are given sufficient evidence (other people’s testimonies, for example) that the event did occur. It’s not a far stretch, then, that your own brain should be able to trick you into believing that something it made up really happened, at least long enough to set off all the hormones and emotional responses that would equate with such an event. Thus, you wind up with the typical stories, like grown adults flipping out on their spouses for any number of events that were completely fabricated within their own mind.

And while I know that it’s entirely unreasonable to act on the emotion you took away with you from dreamland, I can’t really blame the people who do because, let’s face it…your sleeping brain can be a complete asshole sometimes. For example, I am in a completely happy monogamous relationship with my husband. I trust him, and he (I assume) trusts me, and we love each other very much. And yet, on a fairly regular basis, my brain will have me dreaming about him being unfaithful in some way. I have woken up from dreams feeling like my heart just got ripped out, and I have woken up from dreams certain that I was going to break his face while he was still sleeping. Luckily I’m a (moderately) reasonable person who knows the difference between dreams and reality, but that doesn’t make the emotions that follow such a dream any less real. Eventually, when the fallout wears off and I’m able to take a deep breath and think again, I blame my brain for being a total pain-in-the-ass jerk.

Dreams…the window to the soul, or an open opportunity for your subconscious to torture you and see how much of a fool it can make you act like?

I know I’m not the only one. Who else here has woken up mad as hell, or bawling your eyes out, even though you know that what you just dreamed about didn’t really happen? Have you ever accidentally acted on those feelings before you could bring yourself back to reality? Share!

The Depressingly Difficult Rehabilitation of a Tomboy

I’ve never been accused of being a girly girl. Growing up I preferred jeans to skirts, ponytails to any other hairstyle, and sneakers to heels. I was the kind of girl who would rather play with her male cousins’ action figures than with Barbies. Some of my favorite shows when I was a kid were Ninja Turtles and Power Rangers. And I wasn’t into that cutesy Pink Ranger…I wanted to be the ultra-cool loner Green Ranger.

I grew up around mostly boy cousins, I always got along better with the boys in my classes, and I chose a career path that had me constantly surrounded by guys. I was the first woman to ever be hired as a tradesman at the paper mill where I used to work. I play video games, drink hard liquor, and couldn’t give less of a rat’s backside about the lives of celebrities or reality show contestants.

You could say, I suppose, that I’ve always been a bit of a tomboy. And that’s fine. I definitely think I’ve turned out better for it, to be perfectly honest.

But in my advanced age (dude, I’m gonna be thirty next year!) I’ve begun to poke a little into the world of girly girls…or womanly women, I guess. Mostly this has come as the result of having a daughter. While I happily wear jeans, I just can’t help but think that it’s so adorable when she wears skirts. It’s some strange, motherly madness. But at least some of my foray into womanliness has come as a desire to simply start looking like I care a little more about my appearance. Jeans, t-shirts, and a ponytail don’t exact scream, “I spent more than five minutes getting ready this morning!” And honestly, I can look really nice if I bother to put in some effort.

So I started putting in some effort, in the form of pulling out the ponytails and wearing my hair down every so often. But there is a caveat to this decision. See, my hair is thick, wavy in a completely nonsensical way, and likes to frizz out like I just touched something full of static. This is the reason why I have to straighten it with a flat iron.

Given that I’m a technician by trade, you wouldn’t think this would be a huge problem, but I have come to establish that flat iron use is one of the most complicated things I’ve ever done.

The first time I tried to do it I did what any lifetime tomboy would probably do…I just picked up chunks of hair and started running them through the iron. What felt like hours later I had accomplished visibly bugger all. What the hell was I doing wrong, I wondered? My hairdresser always managed to make this look good during my one or two visits a year (don’t judge me).

So the next time I was at my hairdresser I paid attention I what she was doing instead of daydreaming about what my husband would say if I showed up home with my hair completely hacked off. What I found was that she would pick up 85% of my hair, pin it up on top of my head, and use the flat iron on the little bit that was left. Then she let a little more down and repeat, and repeat until the whole thing was done.

Ah. Do it in layers. I totally should have though of that.

So that’s what I did: I got one of those little alligator clip thingies, piled most of my hair up on top of my head, and went to work. And it worked! Slowly. Very, painstakingly slowly. Again it felt like hours before it was done and though the result wasn’t half bad I felt that it had been an outrageous waste of time.

It wasn’t until months later that my sister-in-law informed me that my straightener was a cheap piece of junk, suitable for women with super-thin hair, but not for my horse-like mane. I needed more heat, she told me. I needed the kind of flat iron that the hairdressers use, the ones that go up to “holy Christ almighty that is scalding!” levels.

So I appealed to my hairdresser, she promise to order me a decent iron that could withstand my Herculean hair, and since it was close to my birthday my parents told me they’d get it for me. Huzzah! A month later I held my brand new flat iron, all shiny blue, with a temperature rating just under the bowels of hell itself. Hot damn, I was finally going to have this thing figured out!

So I ripped the flat iron out of its packaging, piled 85% of my hair up on top of my head, and set to straightening my hair… And immediately cried out in agony. Turned out that the flat iron was so hot that the residual heat it left behind on my hair burned the hell out of the side of my face and neck. I had neglected to notice that when my hairdresser does this she uses a comb to hold the hair away from my head for a few seconds to allow some of the heat to dissipate. Achieving this same maneuver on your own head is surprisingly difficult and evidently requires a fair deal of practice, because I scalded myself at least a dozen more times. My pride was a wee bit sore after that one. So was my neck.

In the end, I’m still a rather large tomboy, and I’ll still wear my hair in ponytails most of the time, but I am also determined to get the hang of this thing if for no other reason than proving that the girly girls aren’t somehow better than me. Because, dammit, I’m a technician and I’m not going to let two strips of hot metal get the better of me!**

**The famous last words of Mrs Tracey Lynn Tobin