by Andrew Post

Created on: April 24, 2008

I have irrational dreams, and my nightmares occasionally have happy endings. I don't know what that says about me or my mental state, but it's the truth. On the rare occasions when I remember my dreams, they are uniformly weird, to the point where it would be difficult for anyone but Sigmund Freud to interpret them. I wake up some mornings and wonder what the blazes I could have been stressing about the previous day that made me dream the dreams I had that night.

To explain to you what I mean by having a "happy ending" accompany a nightmare, I once had a pretty stereotypical "falling" dream. I was plummeting through a white void in my pajamas with no bed to catch me at the bottom and no visible terrain features to grab hold of. Popular wisdom says you must always wake yourself up somehow before you hit the ground, or risk dying in your sleep. (As the eminently satirical Douglas Adams once said, "You are as dead as you think you are.") I had heard this rule somewhere before, but either forgot it under the circumstances (how many old wives' tales can you mentally process while you're falling through empty space at 32 feet per second?) or chose to ignore it.

I didn't wake up before I landed. Miraculously, I didn't die when I did.

I bounced.

I'm not kidding. I still remember this dream as vividly as though I'd had it last night. I hit the ground, also white and featureless, without feeling a thing...and promptly bounced forty feet back up into the air. I came down again and bounced again, not as high this time, like a rubber ball dropped on a hardwood floor. I came down again, and right as I was about to strike the ground for the third time, I woke up. Perhaps the overarching weirdness of it all overwhelmed my subconscious.

The first nightmare I ever remember having occurred in third grade, when I was living in Ohio. This is also probably the most vivid dream of any kind that I've ever experienced. The setting was the sidewalk in front of my house. Every little detail of that scene, from the cracks in the sidewalk to the scary blue house four houses down the street, was burned into that dream. My brother and I were on the curb doing homework. I get the feeling that I must have been playing with my dinosaur coloring books before I went to bed that night, because there were a lot of very oddly hued dinosaurs stomping around my street in my dream. My brother and I were just sitting there calmly, trying to do arithmetic while purple sauropods thundered past. Suddenly, I

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