DREAMS?! WTF!?

Ok, so when I was a wee lad, slowly growing out of diapers and into power rangers, I was often awakened by a very strange and haunting dream that would not leave me the hell alone. These types of dreams are referred to as recurring dreams, and I am sure many of you have been the recipient of this strange phenomenon. What is weird to me, and to this day has never been revealed, is why in the world I kept having that dream. Come to think of it, why did I have ANY dream at all?

During the time of these relentless nocturnal brain fillers, I lived in St. Petersburg Florida home of sand, sun, and Hungry Howie's pizza. Now, as with many small persons growing up in the world, my favorite place to go, out of ANYWHERE, was (and still is) Chuckie Cheese. My world WAS Chuckie Cheese, and every free moment I had was used begging my parents to take me to this awe filled place of pizza, tokens, tickets, and skee ball. This MAY explain why my recurring dream always dealt with Chuckie himself (the mouse, not the My Buddy-turned-killer). Yeah, I know, Chuckie Cheese, haunting MY dreams. And that is just it, they weren't happy dreams of the multi talented musician-mouse, they were horrendous manifestations of a very eerie 6 foot tall mouse. Chuckie Cheese was always a haunted house in my dreams, and I was riding a carnival ride through it all. There was fire, demons, a few dragons sprinkled in there, and a huge black and red castle. There were no tokens, no tickets, and definitely no pizza. So why the hell did hell manifest itself as Chuckie Cheese?!

These dreams have since been stuffed away in the corner of my head where I keep the memories of things like Kazaam and Juwanna Mann, among other things I would like to forget. I wonder though, why did I have that dream, or why did I have the dream where I trip over pine cones to my death, or the one where I was dancing with a bunch of walking rams around a fire, or the one where I sat talking to an old man whispered sweet nothings into my ear and abruptly transformed into a jaguar. Point is, we all have super weird dreams from time to time, and some are actually brought on by our diet that night, or our lack of sleep from the week, or even the last thing we hear before we hit that all-important R.E.M (stupid band reference joke here).

Now that we have all dismissed the misogynistic, sex driven man who coined the phrase Psychoanalysis, It is safe to move on to another explanation of dreams. After all, Freud thought dreams were things of our unconscious that came about because we are all repressed. In his book, The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud alludes to many different reasons for the dreams we have, but they all relate back to the repression of our inner most sinister and secret thoughts. Freud was sure that our dreams were our way of dealing with the constant societal pressures that keep our thoughts to ourselves. According to Freud, everything we dream about is a symbol for something in our waking lives. Eh, I find this interesting, but it gives us humans far too much credit in the field of metaphor and symbolism, I don't think we find universal symbolism in ALL of the same organic and in-organic objects.

SOOOOO, if it isn't symbolism for our sexually suppressed minds that our dreams are created, what is it? Entertainment? Fear Mongering? what about Evolution? Whoa whoa whoa...evolution, dreams? Sorry Freud, its time I hang out with a REAL man of Science... Mr. Darwin, Is it true that our dreams are really mechanisms for survival?

Dogs dream don't they? Well, we can see them flailing around as if they were frolicking with the best of the best rabbits all the while enjoying the best steaks ever produced. So we don't really know what dogs are dreaming about, but lets assume they have a similar perception in their dreams as in their observation of their real world. We would then assume, according to Freud, that symbols arise in dreams for the same reasons in dogs as in humans. In lieu of getting deeper into this anti-Freud postulate, I will just say this: humans do not share the same symbols in their lives, and I don't think I need to prove that humans and dogs do not share common symbols either.

Back to Darwin and his "dangerous idea". Seeing as how I can't find any recent empirical evidence in any form, nor have I found any REAL theories about the idea, I must deduce for myself and create for you a blueprint of the newest theory of why we dream:

Random Thought Mutations

The mutation of our thoughts, somewhat homologous with genetic mutations, may be the real reason we dream. The idea is that we use all five senses to perceive things during the day as well as in our sleep, and mix and mash those perceptions into new scenarios to see how we would react to them. They are almost like test runs for what MAY happen in our future, and our mind is preparing accordingly so that we may survive and continue the transferring of our genes unto the next generation. We dream at night to prepare ourselves for the next wave of dancing chickens with uzis for hands and rainbow colored feathers. NO! well, maybe, but that isn't the theory. The theory is that we formulate all of these mash-ups for our own benefit in the world. A way to see if those thoughts could be useful sometime in our future. Almost like genes randomly arising with no observable purpose, our thoughts can be randomized to create novel thoughts. These thoughts, like novel traits in evolving organisms, could help shape the success of our existence. With the aid of our brain and the random mutation of thoughts, we could dream about the next big Twilight rip-off, or even a new approach to curing diabetes. All of the information could already be in our underutilized brains, and we just need to "see the light" in our dreams. Sure, dreams could just be entertaining ways for our brains to relax, a sort of prime-time programming for our all-day-laboring brains to sit on the couch and enjoy. If this is the case, why do I always wake up before I am going to die, because I thought death was a big money maker in the entertainment world. I guess that is another question all together.

This theory is yet another way our minds and bodies are reduced to nothing but complete slaves to nature and survival (of genes that is). It seems kinda neat, at the very lest, to think that our brains are using all incoming stimuli to construct possible futures for is to delve into as well as novel ideas to latch onto and create. I wonder if people in the early 1600's had dreams about 25 foot tall Ronald McDonalds rampaging through bio-domes on the moon. Doubtful, unless of course they had different names for the parties involved. There were clowns back then, right?