I have a dream (always)

After playing “relaxing music” on YouTube, I sit down - cross-legged - and close my eyes. I have one objective: focus on the rhythm of my breath. For maybe 10 seconds, I succeed. Inevitably, my mind wanders off by conjuring memories from the past or making up scenarios for the future.

For the mind to do that, we don’t need to close our eyes. Think about how many times you didn’t notice something happening in the present because you were lost in thought. It’s a common experience to be looking at someone speaking to us, but only listen to the voice inside our head. 

Our thoughts mostly contain instances that are blurry and lack details, but we get the gist of it. Dreams aren’t that different. One way to know if you are dreaming is by counting your fingers. If you look at your hand in your dream, it certainly won’t have 5 fingers. It seems as if the fingers were placed on the palm by a lousy architect.  

We cannot predict our thoughts and they tend to bounce from one context to another. One moment you can be thinking about a scene from “No way home”, and a second later it changes to something embarrassing that you did 5 months ago. In a recent dream I had, I was walking with a boy. Midway, he turned into a girl. We were no longer walking, I was sitting behind her on a scooter in a different country. It’s fair to say that both thoughts and dreams are not that coherent. 

Our mind is always creating its own reality that we cannot control. Maybe we’re always dreaming in some way, it just becomes more intense when we’re asleep. Maybe we need abstract imagination to make sense of this complex world.