Closed Eyes by Captain Thomas Martin
The last couple of days I’ve been thinking about dreams. What are they? I’ve heard it said that they are little more than random bits of memory being stored and organized as a person sleeps. It’s also been said that dreams contain a message for those that can decipher them. My guess its a little bit of both. I’ve had a few dreams that had an uncanny foreshadowing to events that happened after the dream.
I guess the question that’s been nagging me the past week or so is, how real are dreams? I think there is a habit of defining ‘real’ as being what we can see, touch, taste, and hear. An apple is easily defined to be real. The shape and color are seen right away, the firmness of the skin felt, the juice tasted when bitten, and the sound of crunch quite audible. All these sensations are broken down into impulses that are then sent to the brain, these impulses tell us that the apple is real. When I mentioned an apple, what color did you picture in you mind? Red maybe? when I mentioned juice, could you for a moment almost taste it? and did you hear the crunch of the bite? Yet the apple presented just now wasn’t real.
I’ve had dreams so real that I honestly couldn’t tell if they had actually happened or not. It wasn’t until I talked to the person in question that I knew for sure. There have been times where I knew what happened was a dream, yet when talking to the person that had been in the dream, they had, had a similar dream the same night. If what we kn0w as real, are simply impulses that the brain is picking up. Is it possible for dreams to be more real than normally thought?
I don’t have an answer. I do know that through my dreams I have had a chance to fly many times, been the only person in a city of monsters and survived. I have been killed in countless ways, felt all ranges of emotions. I have been in many families, I have been married and had kids of my own. I have lived and ran with wolves, raised by dragons, and hunted with lions. I had the chance to be a the creation of everything, and I have seen it all end.
I have memories of these dream life’s. Even if they can’t be defined as real they still share a place in my mind.
-----A friend of mine posted this on Facebook, and I thought I'd share.-----