On Saturday I woke up feeling weird, not physically ill, but the weird you feel after going through some emotional event. Today we’re going to examine that. Before we start, full disclaimer that we’re not going to talk about anything that happened to me on Friday because these emotional events happened in a dream.

I was about to start writing about the dream, but I realized that by now most of the details are gone. As I’ve come to expect from dreams, their existence is quite fragile, and where they often feel like reality, their imprint in my memory is really soft and easily fades with time.

I can however talk about a reflection I had while talking to my girlfriend about my dream. When I was recounting my dream, from which I could remember several different scenarios, I could always tell why I dreamt that.

At one point, I realized I was in a house because we were celebrating my birthday. Well, my birthday actually is in a few days, and lately, I’ve been reflecting on turning 25, and what that actually means for my life.

During the celebration, people gathered around me and started giving me presents, one of which was a mystery LEGO minifigure, and, where I could surely reflect on why I dreamt about the gift-circle (but won’t), I can already say that the LEGO thing appeared because lately I’ve been enjoying LEGO a lot, as a throwback to my childhood, and have been thinking of buying some of those minifigures.

People often say that dreams are an omen for things to come, as if God, or Fate, or any other higher force, were telling us about the future. My view is that dreams are just a way of our body helping us process complex emotions.

By making us go through scenarios as if we were living them, our brain enables us to “practice” how we would handle them, thus allowing us to “perform” better if they actually come to fruition.

One may think that we can just reflect on things while we’re awake. But the fact is, that reflecting on something is not the same as actually going through the scenario, and with the added benefit of “dream ignorance”, i.e., the fact that we can’t tell the dream from reality.

So, where does this leave us? First, it would be fun to know if this “theory” has any scientific background. Also, I would like to further invest in this dream analysis, to see if there is something I can learn from them. What I hope to achieve, is that I can look at my dreams, and figure out why I dreamt about that, and reflect on how the outcomes of those scenarios feel. To do this, I’m going to start writting, in the morning, the things I can remember from my dreams.

That’s it for this week’s reflection, see you next week!