avocado8

These Dreams

In the past week, I have dreamed the following:

• I met Dooce. I knocked on her door, asked, "are you Heather?", introduced myself, and the next thing I knew, we were going on a girls' night out with some other women. Dooce was pregnant again and looked great. I was surprised that she'd decided to have another baby so soon, but I didn't say anything (except that she looked great).
• I was lying in bed one morning, with Austen on his back next to me, looking like his normal six week-old self. He turned to me and said, "Mommy, can we please cuddle?" followed by another phrase I can't remember now. I do remember telling Al what he said later on in the dream.
• I accidentally screwed up a setting in the Movable Type preferences, and when I went to write a blog post the next morning, I found 25,312 spam posts on the site. (Not comments—POSTS.) Interspersed with the spam posts were entries from well-meaning regular readers attempting to alert me to the problem. I couldn't believe that many entries were added without filling up the server (and therefore corrupting all my MT databases).
• Austen (again, his normal six week-old self) climed out of his Pack 'N Play and stood up on the changing table. Alarmed, I told Al that we'd need to find somewhere else for him to sleep—preferably some kind of crib or pen with higher sides.

I had several other dreams that I can't remember the details of now, but what they all had in common were themes and subjects that I've never dreamed about before and no source in reality that I could discern. Normally my dreams have regular themes, and I often dream of the same places or situations repeatedly. I remember waking up after each one of these recent dreams thinking, "wow, that was a strange thing to dream about" or "why would *I* dream about *that*?"

I wonder if it's because I'm so sleep-deprived. I remember reading an article once about a study that showed that after being awake for an artificially long time (e.g., 24 hours straight), people would drop directly into REM sleep. That would certainly account for an increased number of dreams, but does it also account for the increased variety of dream themes? Perhaps I've been dreaming about these weird subjects all along and just didn't remember it because I wasn't being awoken several times in the middle of the night by a hungry baby. Anyway, it's a puzzler.