Issue 100, December 2006
Hangover dreams
©Jane Teresa Anderson, December 2006
Does the movie you watched last night, the cheese you ate after dinner or the whisky you knocked back all evening affect your dreams? Might a hot night, a thunderstorm, a full bladder, a rattling window, a screeching mosquito or a headache explain away a few weird dreams over the Christmas period?
Yes and then again, no! Let’s start with the movie. If a movie really affects you, your dreaming mind will often process the parts that resonated with your emotions, personal issues, beliefs and life experiences. Your dream may or may not use some of the symbols from the movie, but whatever the dream, do not dismiss it as being caused by the film! Think of the movie as having prompted issues that need your deeper attention.
How about that cheese or alcohol overload? The idea that cheese causes bad dreams is an old wives’ tale, though body sensations such as indigestion, thirst, cold, a full bladder, a blocked nose and numbness can get picked up by your brain and woven into the storyline of a dream. So your indigestion might turn up in a dream as a python coiling around your waist, the thirst as a shift in scene to a desert, the cold air as a passing ghost, or the numbness as a lost limb, but these will vary from person to person and from dream to dream. Again the important thing is not to dismiss your dream as being caused by the cheese, cold or thirst, but to ask yourself why your dream has chosen a certain symbol or way of processing the sensation. That symbol is meaningful, as is your dream! It tells you about how your mind works and that’s the object and power of dream interpretation!
The rattling window might become the sound of a roulette game in one person’s dream, a cattle train speeding by in another person’s dream and a garbage bin being emptied in someone else’s. How the dreaming mind interprets the intrusion and how it goes on to incorporate it into the dream storyline delivers meaningful insight about the dreamer.
So never dismiss any dream! Oh, about the alcohol. Binge drinking can knock out dreams for a few hours, but if you sleep long enough you’ll experience more intense dreams towards morning. It’s as if the dreaming mind has to squeeze all the dreams in at the end of the night, once the worst of the alcohol is out of your system. These intense dreams are known as ‘REM Rebound’ dreams. REM stands for normal dreaming (Rapid Eye Movement phase). Too much alcohol blocks REM in the early hours so – hey – come morning it’s rebound time!
So eat, drink and be merry over the December festive season, but don’t dismiss those hangover dreams. Whether it’s an overload of alcohol, food, parties, people, relations, sun, snow, school holidays or all those books and movies you lap up during the Christmas period, your dreaming mind does not take time off. Treasure every dream, and if you’re enjoying the luxury of time off work and have got out of the habit of recording your dreams (or if you’ve never tried this), here are some tips to get you back in the mood. (These also double as Christmas gift ideas: add to your wish-list or gift to others.)
The time-honoured method is a handwritten journal. For this, buy a beautiful notebook to use as your Dream Journal, or buy a plain one and embellish it to make it special.
If you prefer to type simply set up a folder on your laptop or buy an electronic dream journal, on CD Rom, with extra features such as a search facility you can use to search back over your dreams looking for symbols or recurring themes.
If you don’t like writing or typing, you can record your dream onto audio, or draw stick figures with speech balloons and linking texts, like a storyboard for a movie. For this you might want to invest in a plain-paged artist’s book.
Record the date and give each dream a title. It’s best to choose a title that describes the dream in a nutshell, like “Lost in the city” or “Breakfast with an elephant”.
Whichever method you use, leave plenty of space for writing notes later in the day when you revisit your dream to interpret it. You might want to draw up two columns, one to jot down your interpretations, one to note your daily experiences, thoughts, feelings and issues to see how these are reflected in your dreams.
Finally create an index page at the back of your Dream Journal, or use a small index book if you are working in audio. Simply record your dream titles on this page, alongside the page number on which they are recorded. Every six weeks, turn to your index page and just read your dream titles in date order. You’ll be surprised at how insightful this exercise is!
Jane Teresa Anderson
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