Let me tell you about a recent dream.
A father of one of my bus families invited me to come to his driving range in Estevan. I told him I’d be thrilled to come out and hit a few golf balls, and it worked out well, because I had to take my bus into Estevan for some scheduled maintenance. But I didn’t drive my bus. I took my car instead.
That was a foolish decision because it takes me an hour to get my bus to Estevan, three to four hours for the technicians to do their thing and another hour to get back to Carnduff. I can’t leave for Estevan until around 9 a.m. (when my morning bus run is finished) and have to be back by 3 p.m. to get the kids home. Time is tight.
So, the whole time I’m hitting golf balls, I’m wondering how I could be so stupid in bringing my car rather than the bus. It bothered me so much that I only hit 10 balls before deciding to drive back to get my bus.
The father told me I hit 14 balls and he was going to charge me individually for each of them. I had presumed he was inviting me to come out for free, so this upset me and we had a fierce argument over how many balls I had actually hit.
I paid him (I can’t remember how much) and stormed out to my car. On my way home to Carnduff, I woke up and the dream was over.
I laid in bed thinking “Where in the world did that come from?”
I do drive a bus, I was scheduled to take it in for maintenance the morning following the dream, I had driven by a driving range a couple of days earlier and the father in the dream is a real bus family father.
Somehow, while the rest of me was sleeping or taking it easy, my brain took several pieces of information from the file folders in my mind…and created a story.
I’m sure you have dreams regularly. You likely know what I mean when I say that the brain is an incredible thing. I’ve wondered, at times, whether the brain’s ability to create dreams out of seemingly disconnected things is the source of many novels and short stories. The brain has an active imagination, especially when we’re sleeping.
I first began thinking of this as a teenager. One night, I had a vivid dream. In it, my young people’s group was on stage in a church service. We were doing a live advertisement showing what our youth group did, attempting to attract more young people to join.
Kids were doing sports, others were sitting in a Bible study, some were just hanging out and many were eating. I was the MC and at the end of it, I said, “And folks…you ain’t seen nothing yet!” At that moment, I woke up and the deejay on the radio that I was sleeping to said, “And that was Bachman-Turner Overdrive, with their hit song You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet.
That song lasts 3 1/2 minutes. In that short time, my brain had subconsciously taken that song and pulled things from my memory banks and created a dream, a story that seemed much longer than the length of the song.
The human brain is a great mystery. Most of us don’t think too much about it, but it is an unbelievable organ. Think of all the things you know – names, places, events, trivia, statistics. It’s all filed away somewhere and when we’re sleeping, for reasons unknown, the brain starts digging around and comes up with some pretty bizarre and interesting things. Dreams, we call them.
Which reminds me – time for a nap to see what adventure my brain will entertain me with next.
