by Noah Burd

Created on: August 10, 2008

It's the fourth night in a row that I've been to the yellow city. Returning to my bed, I open my eyes and the corn-colored buildings etched in my retinas become the mustard sun rays penetrating the windows of my suburban abode. In my recently escaped reverie, the city gained a new street. I look to the map on my bulletin board. There it is! Downtown - between the park and the house I accidentally robbed. This is my dream map.

Consult nearly any text on sleeping, be it a polished tome on lucid dreaming or a pseudoscientific website wrought with inaccuracies, and you will be advised that the best way to improve your ability to recall dreams is to record those details that you remember once awakened. It's an enticing concept. After all, who likes waking up wondering what his or her dream self has been doing all night? The daily amnesia transforms life into a "Dude, Where's My Car" marathon.

To avoid that unpleasant slumber-hangover, you buy a one hundred and twenty sheet college ruled notebook and place it beside your bed. "Dreams," you label it, thus stripping it of any other possible use this pad might ever have enjoyed. You put it on the desk next to your bed, change into your pajamas, and turn out the light.

However, while you are off in a land of dinosaurs, clowns, and laser beams, your block experiences a power surge. Hours later, you wake up, still reveling in the ecstasy of your dreams. Then you see that horrible green blinking light that means your clock reset itself to twelve o' clock sometime during the night. You check your watch, realize that you're late for work, and rush out the door.

Perhaps another morning you wake up with time to spare, a new dream vivid in your mind. But the truth is, you're a kind of strange person. Your dreams are bizarre, like the rest of ours, and maybe the risk associated with a pesky parent or a snooping spouse finding your neuroses articulated in a dream journal just doesn't seem to be worth the trouble.

Now it has been months since you put the cursed notebook on your desk. It has become a book of empty dreams - a testament to the puniness of your own imagination and goals, you think to yourself. So you give up on recording your dreams, and the person that runs through your head while you sleep remains as enigmatic as ever.

It was through such frustration that my dream map acquired its first road. One afternoon I was sitting idly on my computer chair watching the stars of the screen saver race towards the perimeter of the monitor.

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>