My Life's Like a Dream

You know when you have the strangest dreams, and they sometimes are one of the funniest dreams you have ever had? You might see your university building name label which used to have a letter on it change to have one of your friend's names' on it. You might dream that you saw someone you missed so much in one of the most awkward situations imaginable. You might also dream that you are watching yourself sleeping...

With dreams, you have those funny situations that sometimes happen for no reason. Maybe your body wanted to laugh, so your subconscious gave it that laugh. Sometimes, though, things haunt you in your dreams. You get nightmares that wake you up in the middle of the night in such a deep sweat that you'd rather spend the rest of the night awake than go back to sleep and risk having that nightmare again. Your nerves simply can't take it.

Of course, there are the peaceful dreams too, where you'd be running through pastoral fields without a care in the world. Or, perhaps, hovering over clouds. Touching the soft cotton candy, and feeling the sun's rays play with your skin.

Now the subconscious is a very powerful tool. This is demonstrated in the following chosen excerpts derived from the book blink by Malcolm Gladwell:

In September of 1983, an art dealer by the name of Gianfranco Becchina approached the J. Paul Getty Museum in California. He had in his possession, he said, a marble statue dating from the sixth century BC. It was what is known as a kouros - a sculpture of a nude male youth standing with his left leg forward and his arms at his sides. There are only about two hundred kouroi in existence, and most have been recovered badly damaged or in fragments from grave sites or archeological digs. But this one was almost perfectly preserved. It stood close to seven feet tall. It had a kind of light-colored glow that set it apart from other ancient works. It was an extraordinary find. Becchina's asking price was just under $10 million.The Getty moved cautiously. It took the kouros on loan and began a thorough investigation.
...
Where and when had the statue been found? No one knew precisely, but Becchina gave the Getty's legal department a sheaf of documents relating to its more recent history.
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Fourteen months after their investigation of the kouros began, they agreed to buy the statue. In the fall of 1986, it went on display for the first time.
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The kouros, however, had a problem. It didn't look right. The first to point this out was an Italian art historian named Federico Zeri, who served on the Getty's board of trustees. When Zeri was taken down to the museum's restoration studio to see the kouros in December of 1983, he found himself staring at the sculpture's fingernails. In a way he couldn't immediately articulate, they seemed wrong to him. Evelyn Harrison was next.
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"Arthur Houghton, who was then the curator, took us down to see it," Harrison remembers. "He just swished a cloth off the top of it and said, 'Well, it isn't ours yet, but it will be in a couple of weeks.' And I said, 'I'm sorry to hear that.'" What did Harrison see? She didn't know. In that very first moment, when Houghton swished off the cloth, all Harrison had was a hunch, an instinctive sense that something was amiss.
A few months later, Houghton took Thomas Hoving [...] down to the Getty's conservation studio to see the statue as well. Hoving always makes a note of the first word that goes through his head when he sees something new, and he'll never forget what that word was when he first saw the kouros. "It was 'fresh' - 'fresh,'" Hoving recalls. And "fresh" was not the right reaction to have to a two-thousand-year-old statue.
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the Getty's case began to fall apart. The letters the Getty's lawyers used to carefully trace the kouros back to the Swiss physician [...] turned out to be fake.
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When [...] - all the others - looked at the kouros and felt an "intuitive repulsion," they were absolutely right. In the first two seconds of looking - in a single glance - they were able to understand more about the essence of the statue than the team at the Getty was able to understand after fourteen months.

Thus, the power of the subconscious mind. The power of the first two seconds, the first glance, the first impression that you get from a person - you just have that strange feeling about them and you can't trust them because of it.

Yes, the subconscious mind truly is a powerful tool. It gives our body what our conscious minds cannot; the ability to know with feelings. It also makes our bodies face our fears that are needed in order to struggle and be able to survive by haunting our dreams, or gives us the peace our body needs.

Our lives are ruled by the subconscious. They're like dreams... in their funny situations, tense and nightmarish ones and the good peaceful ones. We feed on them, they're what give us hope.
They also define who we are.

My life's like a dream; I can't help but wonder whose it is, and whether they're enjoying it.


Breaking the Chains:

"They say dreams are the windows of the soul--take a peek and you can see the inner workings, the nuts and bolts."

Henry Bromel