Insomnia and Larry Hagman

I had a strange dream, about the television show Dallas last night – specifically the one where JR gets shot. Larry Hagman had, in my dream, been setting up the scene and as the other actor “shot” him, he really went down. For real – there was a real bullet in the gun, not an actor bullet. It woke me up in a cold, cold sweat. I had this weird disconnect from reality in which I felt as if I needed to call some one and make it clear that when JR had been shot that on the show that the real Larry Hagman died.

This odd, intense moment of non-reality lead me to wonder what is going on in our little brains when we sleep. In fact, it made me wonder so much that I couldn’t sleep for the rest of the night.

So, in order to save myself from another insomniatic night, I have been poking around various sources all morning and trying to come up with something that I feel I can adhere to. I have found everything from dreams being reduced to the simple functioning of biological matter with no deeper meaning to dreams being a conversation with god. I felt my Larry Hagman dream had nothing to do with either one of those things. I did find this – it is an interesting breakdown:

Why do we have dreams and what do they mean? These questions have for centuries been the subject of a debate that has recently become the center of a heated controversy. In one camp we have a number of prominent scientists who argue that we dream for physiological reasons alone and that dreams are essentially mental nonsense devoid of psychological meaning: “A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” The idea that dreams are nothing more than “meaningless biology” sounds absurd and rather blasphemous to the opposing camp, a coalition of Freudians and other dream workers committed to the view that we dream for psychological reasons and that dreams always contain important information about the self or some aspects of one’s life which can be extracted by various methods of interpretation. This camp takes its credo from the Talmudic aphorism that “an uninterpreted dream is like an unopened letter.” There is also a third camp occupying the middle ground, that believes both of the extreme positions on the function and meaning of dreams to be partly right and partly wrong. Its proponents argue that dreams may have both physiological and psychological determinants, and therefore can be either meaningful or meaningless, varying greatly in terms of psychological significance.

It takes some of the glory out of my Dallas dream, no? But I think if I keep poking around, I might just not be kept awake with the wondering and the oddity of it all.