So here's strip 2 of my comic strip. Since I have no space limitations here, I have not sized it to comic strip size yet. It's easier to read this way!

Thanks to my new art teacher, Gail Pean, who is helping me learn to make it prettier!

If you like it, please tell me! Suggestions welcome, too. Rabraham1@cox.net  Thanks for reading it!

I apologize for the quality. I'll be working on improving it. I'd love your feedback, by email or comment below. rabraham1@cox.net.

I liked this picture and the thought that accompanied it, so I thought I'd post it here.

"Dreaming about the days when he was just a mere sapling."

There are lots of wild and weird and wonderful things about life, but the weirdest by a long shot is dreams.  I think all of us have woken up many times in our lives and, while still in that nether world between sleep and awake, said, “Wow, that was a strange one”, before reaching over to turn off the alarm.  Then almost always the dream is lost forever – though sometimes we revisit it later to find that we are angry at someone we meet  because of a role they had played in a dream! At which point we realize we’d been scowling at them with no reasonable explanation: “Sorry, I was just pissed off at you because of what you did in my dream last Tuesday.” Better to just slink off, red-faced, and disappear.

I never remember my dreams, except for a few recurring ones that have been with me a long time and have become part of my library. Once long ago I tried doing the things that make it possible to remember them, namely writing down every detail I could recall as soon as I awoke, but it was too much trouble and I felt like I wasn’t sleeping as well because I was thinking about it. These days I don’t seem to dream at all; I take Ativan, a sedative, to help me get to sleep, and it seems to white them out. Last night I felt like I could get to sleep without a pill, and I did have several dreams, though I don’t recall any of them. But it did inspire me to start this essay.

I’m sure medical science has a thorough explanation of the whys and hows and wherefores of dreams: what they are, why we have them, and so forth. With a small amount of effort, I could do a little research and find out the prevailing thinking. But I’m lazy, and frankly, I like my own fabrication of what they are and what they mean. (Similar to my fabrications about politics, economics, and government.)

Basically, I believe dreams are just random stories that are generated by the accidental and arbitrary paths that electrical impulses take as they pinball around our brains. I visualize it like droplets running down a window in the rain, connecting with blots already there and making conduits along the way. I’m sure this has no basis in truth, but I don’t care. It makes more sense to me than the notion that dreams are expressions of our unconscious selves and have great meaning about our true desires. Or maybe I just don’t like what my dreams would say about me if I made the effort to listen. But that’s my truth, and I’m going to hold onto it.

I know that psychiatry takes great stock in dreams, and that interpreting dreams is a standard practice in the field and the specialty of many practitioners. However, it seems to me that it is just a technique they use to have something to talk about. So when the therapist says “This dream means that you are angry at your mother because she liked your sister more than you by several orders of magnitude”, well, who is going to argue with that? It seems to me that any competent therapist has a good idea of what is wrong with her patient within the first session; explaining it via dream interpretation then yields them ten more years of billable hours.

Here are a few of my recurring dreams. Really they are just dream themes; I don’t think it’s possible to remember an entire dream. That would require volumes. But much of it would be monotonous and redundant – doesn’t it seem like dreams backtrack and stay stuck in the same place for long periods of time? Mine do.

One of my recurrent themes has me as the 12^th man on the Chicago Bulls basketball team. I’m sort of a reincarnation of John Paxson: short, slow, and white. Though he is actually about 6”2”, so he’s only relatively short. Anyway, I don’t get to play much, which certainly relates to my actual career, but when I do get in, I generally make a few dunks as well as jump shots. I always loved basketball, even though I can’t jump over a sheet of paper and I can barely palm a grapefruit. So, clearly this is one of my wildest dreams.

(Aside: the story goes that when Nick Saban, the very successful Alabama football coach, was standing on the podium next to his wife after the Crimson Tide won the National Championship, he turned to her and said, “Honey, in your wildest dreams did you ever think we’d be standing here?” To which she replied, “I’ve got news for you dear – you are not in my wildest dreams”.)

Another frequent but less pleasant dream has me driving on a long suspension bridge. The bridge keeps getting steeper and steeper, and I reach a point when I can no longer see more than 50 feet in front of me… then 25… then 10, and then I finally go hurtling off the end of the bridge and flying into the air. At that point I usually wake up in a bit of a panic before I hit the water. This theme doesn’t seem to relate to anything in my real life, but maybe one of my brothers threw me off a balcony when I was two.

My favorite recurring dream has me has floating down the inter-coastal waterway from Va. Beach to Miami on a large raft. Except it’s not really like the inter-coastal waterway, it’s more like a wide river with lots of vegetation and big houses perched on the banks. The houses are all brightly lit, and people are partying and dancing wildly, with a great spirit and joy. Those of us on the boat, and I don’t know who you are, are also in joyous moods as we drift swiftly south with the current, enjoying our tropical drinks next to a bonfire. The trip takes us a single night, so I guess the current is pretty fast in this dream! I also have no idea what the basis for this dream might be, but I always wake from it with a sense of calm and well-being.

A dream I used to have a lot has me in a fistfight with one or both of my brothers. I always beat the hell out of them, of course; but then in most of my dreams I’m the one who wins the violent confrontations. Is that true for all of us? I suppose when we lose the battles, we wake up in terror and find it hard to get back to sleep. At least that’s what happens in all of the cop novels. So maybe its nature’s way of protecting us, letting us win when we need our rest. Anyway, I don’t have that one much anymore; I guess I’ve forgiven them for all their past transgressions.

It seems like one of my most frequent recurring dreams has me going back to repeat business school and getting a second chance to start my career. I’m over twice as old as any of the other students, and the professors regard me with quizzical looks, and ask me to present all of the cases. I feel very out of place and embarrassed, and I wonder if I’ll be able to do this again. The meaning of this dream is no mystery; I do have regrets about my career, and often wonder what I would do if I could do it all over again. Unfortunately the dream doesn’t shed any light on that. If I could do it all over again I’d probably make the same mistakes, they all seemed like the right ideas at the time.

I know I have more recurring dreams, but those are the ones I could recall for this essay. Maybe there will be a part two sometime when I remember a few more. It’s likely that when this nightmare that is currently occupying my wakeful hours is over I’ll probably have some new and very interesting dreams. Or maybe I’ll just dream about food all the time – and then actually be able to eat it. That would be quite a nice ending to this story, and proof that dreams can come true. It can happen to you!