Overslept. Which is unusual. I had odd dreams that I am still trying to make sense of. My mind won’t settle. Or wake up fully. This morning there is a gull outside nearby and at first, I thought it was a dog crying. But there lies Leonard on the rug, unperturbed, and I guess he would know.

Sometimes I wonder if we talk to ourselves in dreams. Though, if so, it seems an unnecessarily inefficient method for self-improvement. I wonder if anyone has studied whether people who don’t read poetry or fiction have more literal dreams. Or maybe people who have random dreams become writers because we are actually extremely uptight and have a desperate need to impose our personal order from chaos.

I can analyze my dream, like a scarf-clad clairvoyant reading palms in a carnival tent. It all seems to fit so perfectly. The symbols, the relevance. But then I think about the human tendency to see faces in everything. It’s called Pareidolia. It’s a thing every human does, apparently. But it is more than seeing faces, and the tendency becomes problematic when any random visual impression is interpreted as meaningful.

So where’s the healthy zone on this spectrum? Rorschach tests to Jesus on Toast to… analyzing my dreams.

This dream was harmless and surprisingly empowering when I recall it and match the small scenes with the “issues” in my life at the moment. I feel better about myself having “worked it out”. But I wonder – did my unconscious mind work it out and present it to me to resolve like a riddle. Or did my conscious mind put random images in an order that would be helpful to me in terms of getting through the day?

Is this subconscious mind the “I” that observes me in meditation? Is it a kind of Wizard of Oz still disclosed? Is this why so many of us like our “gods” and our gurus to speak in riddles, to be shrouded in mystery the way our minds are in sleep? We want to recognize god in the way we recognize ourselves – not in terms of our worst selves, like Zeus, but in terms of the oracle we’d also like to think is in our deeper selves, behind some curtain?

red sky at morning
will bring the storm – we know this
the sun wolves tell all