Blog: Manipulating Dreams

I have always had a controlling personality. From dictating who’s MyScene Doll should wear what in second grade, to my current hatred of riding in a car that is being driven by anyone other than myself. I like having control. I like planning and aligning things in order to achieve the most rational and efficient outcome.

Leave it to me to attempt to harness the uncontrollable: dreams.

Typically, I aim to be in bed by 9:30 or 10 at the latest (I’m kind of a badass.) However, I don’t tend to fall asleep for upwards of an hour. I lay in bed, eyes closed, daydreaming…at night (some may consider late-evening.)

I play out my dreams in my head. Hoping that maybe by the time sleep finally claims me, I will have consciously done the work for my unconscious brain. My dreams can be as complicated and intricate as taking the place of a character from my latest TV or book plot craze, or as simple as meeting Big Time Rush casually in downtown KC and becoming their chief costume designer on tour. They can range from adventures such as saving the lives of race car drivers Sebastian Vettel, Jenson Button and Romain Grosjean as a chief medic in the Formula 1 safety car to becoming a F1 driver myself.

As crazy as it may sound, it’s fun. While most people tend to escape through books and music, I like to create my own story. Play with my own dialogue, tweak my own plot twists, explore, test and swap human motives and reactions. I consider myself a very analytical person when it comes to human interaction and human emotions. I tend to approach everything from a technical point of view. I like to explore human emotions and motives and how people relate to and understand each other. Through building and shaping my dreams, I get to play with different scenarios until it makes sense in my head.

The other reason I like to sculpt my dreams is far less pretentious and philosophical. Everyone loves to dream. It’s an retreat. It’s a chance to experience something so fake and unbelievable in a frightfully realistic realm. So why not choose the experience instead of being stuck with the dreams that were so bland you can’t differentiate them from experiences of the day before?

To be honest, this not-so-clever loophole and failing attempt to trick my subconscious mind, hardly ever works. Rarely do my dreams mirror the creation in my head. Though, more often than not, my real dreams stem from my own handiwork with similar themes, major events and characters.

Writing my own dreams is surprisingly relaxing. It helps me turn my mind off before I fall asleep. My brain is so clouded and clustered during the day but the constant movement of things and people around me help to stifle the headache. When I’m finally stationary and everything goes still, my brain seems to work overtime to make up from the neglect of the day. Focusing on one topic and one storyline of a conscious dream helps me to slow my brain down and lull me to sleep. Also it doesn’t hurt to be able to escape the constant routine of the day into an alternate universe where I can decide my own fate and create a world far more interesting than my own reality.