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I have recorded here several of my dreams. No, not the abstract, ambitious, goals and wishes kind of dreams - but the actual dreams that happen in my head as I sleep.

 

In highschool I started keeping a dream journal. At first I was very diligent about recording my dreams, and I found the more I did so, the more I had and the more vividly I could recollect them. It was neat.

 

Then I got out of the habit, for reasons unclear and certainly unjustified. Ever since, I have gone through phases of adding new entries to my subconscious catalogue, but these bouts have been spotty and brief at best.

 

These are not stories. They have not been fleshed out or toned down or polished up or worked over. Names have not been changed to protect the innocent. They are word-for-word transcriptions of the entries as they appear in my journals. Most of these were written in the early morning hours before my brain had completely returned to waking life, and are pretty coarsely written - the tense is constantly flipping back and forth, the word 'and' is used ad nauseam, and pronouns are indiscriminately omitted. I think that's part of the charm. Some would no doubt disagree.

Dreams

I've been surprised at how indicative of a specific time and place in your life dreams can be. It may seem obvious, but going through these entries again transports me back in time more viscerally than any memory or photograph. Dreams reveal something about where your head was at when you were having them, what was important to you, what excited you, what worried you, and who was close to your heart...

 

Or, maybe, they're nothing more than a jumbled mess of random brain-rubbish your unconscious has to vomit out while you sleep to keep from choking on it.

 

Either way, here they are. If you fancy yourself a fledgling dreamologist and want to interpret the hidden meaning behind these dreams (sexual frustration, I'm guessing it's all sexual frustration), then have at it. My subconscious is all yours.

Self indulgent? Absolutely. Relevant? Hardly. Interesting? Doubtful. Wasn't it Morrissey who said no one wants to hear about a dream you had unless they're in it? True enough. But it's been a fascinating on-going project for me, transcribing these 15-year-old entries onto a website. Maybe you'll find some fascination in here too - and who knows, you might be in one of them.

Photo by

Trevor Dunseith

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