Do you ever have one of those dreams that affects your mood and emotional state when you wake up? I only get them twice a year or so, and for me, they tend to be bad dreams, either because what happened affected me so negatively or because I wanted to go back when I did wake up.

I had one a few days ago that was amazing, like I had found my own little paradise. I won’t go into the details, as a lot of them were very personal, but suffice to say I felt touched. My world and mindset is governed by logic, but I won’t pretend or deny that there are things logic (or our understanding at least) cannot explain, and this was one of them. I woke up missing the dream, but in more ways than one I was more thankful that I had the dream than upset that it was over.

One thing I’ve always been interested in is dream theory and the connection of what you dream about to real life. I’m admittedly skeptical of trying to tie symbols or events to future prophecies, but I think what we dream about does have things to teach us about our psyche in ways that our conscious mind could never put together. I wrote a novella called Dreamscape about people going into others’ dreams to solve their personal problems, and my current D&D character is a Circle of Dreams Druid who taps into that part of me.

I don’t feel I have a whole lot of useful things to add on this subject, though. I think these dreams help inform us what’s truly important to us, whether we realize it or not. If you dream about losing a loved one, or finding true love, or any number of other things, maybe that’s your subconscious mind revealing to you that you’re prioritizing the wrong (or the right) things. My mom once had a dream where I died, and when I woke up and got out of bed, she hugged me as soon as she saw me, and if I remember correctly she might have cried a little bit, too. I remember thinking she was being a little weird, because I had just woken up, but after experiencing a similar dream about somebody else, I totally get where she was coming from.

Any time I wake up having a detailed memory of a dream, especially one like this, I write it down as soon as I wake up. For one, it will obviously allow me to reread it later to experience a lot of those same memories. But more importantly I find that it solidifies a lot of those moments in my head so I don’t have to reread it to relive it. (Now, if this was a bad dream I might think twice about it, but even that has some benefits.) Also, I enjoy looking up the things I saw in dream dictionaries, or asking a friend that has a passion for that sort of thing. It sates some idle curiosities.