Dream Catcher

It's happened to all of us at one time or another. You are right in the middle of an awesome dream! It's better than anything you have ever seen at a movie theater! The colors are bright and vivid, you are in the center of the action and the surroundings are crystal clear. If only you had some way to capture this moment it would make millions of dollars and be more culturally worthy than anything to hit the marquee in decades...

then the alarm rings and the dream is gone - POOF!

All that remains is a disquieting feeling that you just experienced something amazing but you can't even lay a finger on its fringe now.

Sad, but true.

Conversely, there is another dream truth.

Any horrible life altering nightmare you have ever had will likely be replayed as late night fodder for an overactive mind. It is as if the bad stuff is a long run theater production that no one wants to really go see but everyone is compelled to attend because we owe a favor of some sort to the director and his tacky kids are in it. We dare not miss it.

Nightmares are always repeaters for me. I can think of a lot of pleasant dreams and recall snatches of detail that is lovely. But the nightmares, I can describe in a brilliance and wonder that would belie their nasty content. Years ago, there was a comic strip that talked about just such a thing.

"They'll Do It Every Time" showed a happy woman skipping through daisies in a pleasant dream only to have it snatched away leaving only a vague sensation of the momentary joy. But let the same woman have a dream of spectral terror, and it comes back night after night leaving her screaming from her bedroom begging for help.

Why does our mind play those kinds of tricks on us?

And can anything be done to change the bad to good?

There are those who claim to have special insight into the meaning of dreams. Entire websites are dedicated to "dream dictionaries" and vouch for the authenticity of their definitions.

But like the psychobabble of days past, I have to say, 'Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar!'

Other than Daniel's Godly interpreting of the dream of Nebuchadnezzar, I haven't heard of a whole lot of spot on commentary on why we dream the things we do - for good OR for ill.

I like to think that a frantic pace and worried mind lends some weight to the issue. Sometimes, whatever is troubling me shows up in my dreams in fractured format. Other times, it's like I'm role playing my way through various solutions as I sleep.

Either way, I don't always find the answer or definition to the dream.

Sometimes a dream is just a dream!

There are times the dream is so wonderful that I wish science had figured out a way to create a dream catcher to preserve and share the great stuff. Other times, I am deeply grateful that technology doesn't exist because the nightmares of their varying hues of blackness disturb me to my soul.

I remember hearing a story from when I was a child, about how when it was bedtime, pixies would come and sprinkle dream dust on us to give us good dreams. I doubted that or worried what kind of fairy I was getting because even as a little kid, I had nightmares.

What kind of perverted fairy scoops up little bags of black dust to sprinkle dreams of spooky fright onto an impressionable child who is afraid of the dark and give them images of ghost in the closets, skeletons under the bed and evil outside the windows?

I wanted the fairy that gave dreams of ponies and flowers and happiness.

Apparently, then and now, I have a fairy with a warped sense of humor. For every pleasant few nights, I am compelled to endure at least one night of heart pounding, pulse racing, sweat provoking, scream inducing, sleep depriving torture via my own dreams.

Does anyone know what bait you use to trap the dream fairy?

I'd like to catch that little waif and give her a taste of her own dusty medicine.