Where do I go to complain? Somebody else is obviously getting my share of good dreams while I am left with all their lousy ones. Is there a Dream Adjustment Bureau available? I’m getting wary of falling asleep at night.
I used to be like everyone else---some good dreams, some bad, but slowly over time the nifty dreams have skedaddled and left the playing field to the dregs of dreamery. It started out with me losing my car. I thought I remembered where I parked it, but it was never there, or anywhere in the vicinity. I’d try to call my wife or a friend for a ride home, but I could never get my phone to work. I have had different versions of the same dream at least two dozen times, so it’s getting old. In real life, I have had my car stolen only once, about 35 years ago, and the cops got it back undamaged in a half hour. In real life, my phone always works.
Siobhan, the dream expert, says this keeps happening because I secretly feel I have lost my power, but that’s not true. I never had any power to begin with, although I did accidentally frighten a few people in Mexico with my Evil Eye. I fear I may have to contact Madame Garbanzo, the Dream Wizard, if this goes on much longer. I would like to be having dreams about riding through Paris in a sports car with the warm wind in my hair or sitting in the Austin Ghetto singing Road to Mingus with John Clay or watching Donald Trump ice-skating on a melting Lake Champlain, but at this stage of the game I would be satisfied with a functioning cell.
Melatonin can cause vivid dreams, mostly when taken in high doses. Melatonin increases REM sleep, the stage of sleep where dreams occur, and it also releases vasotocin, a hormone linked to dream and memory regulation. But I take the bare minimum, only 1mg. Nonetheless, I skipped taking it one night recently and had no bad dreams, perhaps because I barely slept. A cause for celebration? Hardly. When I finally nodded off sometime after six a.m., my phone stopped working again. As Bob Dylan wonders, how many times must the nightmares fly before I’m allowed to be free? You know the answer to that one.
Doctor, Doctor, Mr. M. D.---Now Can You Tell Me What’s Ailing Me?
Lauri Quinn Loewenberg, Dream Expert to the Stars, is often highlighted for her engaging and lively approach to dream interpretation. Lauri is an author and professional dream analyst who has appeared on The Today Show, Dr. Oz and Good Morning America, where she gives real-time interpretations. Ms. Loewenberg has loads of satisfied customers like journalist Margareta Haggland of Stockholm, who lauds “Having my dreams analyzed by Lauri has changed my life. Finding out what my dreams are telling me is like a Christmas gift. My dreams have become tools for me to understand my life and change it for the better.” Gee. How can you beat that? I could stand a little life-changing for the better. Where do I sign up?
You’re not going to believe this, but Lauri is even willing to take on paying customers like me. I discovered I could choose a phone session varying from 15-45 minutes to speak to her and have all my questions answered about these troublesome dreams. A fifteen-minute call costs a mere $45, so how could I go wrong? I took a look at her calendar and chose an 11:30 option on September 11. I could hardly wait to start improving my life.
Conversation With A Dream Whisperer
Lauri Loewenberg called at the crack of 11:30, as I knew she would. If you can’t even manage to call on time, who’s going to pay attention to anything else you have to say? She had a good telephone voice and a cheerful demeanor and after five minutes you felt like you’d known her for years. “Tell me the dream,” she said.
I gave her the dream in all of its varying forms, and even added one from the previous night about losing Roxy, our Rottweiler. We put that one on the shelf for awhile and got down to business on the car dreams. Lauri asked me a hundred questions, of course, including when the dreams originated, if they were preceded by any cataclysmic events, what things were important to me now, and then to provide a brief review of my life. I told her 84 years was a lot of ground to cover. She told me to leave out trips to the mall.
That done, Ms. Loewenberg homed in on my parting with the thoroughbred racing business after 40 years. She asked me what I liked best about it (the actual races, of course) and why we bailed out. I told her the closing of Calder Race Course in Miami made profitability impossible for us. Also, the weight of a hundred calls from trainers with bad news becomes difficult. A two-year-old stakes contender bucks a shin and misses a $100,000 race. A good horse races twice and gets a bowed tendon. Layups get major injuries just running in the field. Mares in foal abort at nine months. Foals die of absurd diseases. Not to mention, we get old and less able to cope. “So this is a critical loss,” Lauri says. “Even though it’s now the right thing to do, you’ve lost something that brought a lot of creativity and excitement to your life.” She moved on to health.
I told her what our lives were like when we met in 1985, what we were doing (a lot) in 2000, 2010, 2020 and now. Major hikes. Climbing mountains. Extensive travel throughout 49 states. The hikes are shorter now and so are the hills. Challenges we would have taken on ten years ago are physically impossible now. “Another major loss,” said Lauri. “Yes, you’ve adjusted, accepted the present situation and made the best of it, but you no longer have something in your lives that you valued.”
I got the drift. In addition to everything else, you’re losing friends and family numbers by the truckload; every few days, The Reaper picks off another one. Octogenaria is a city of unending losses, so persistent they start showing up in dreams. Could be.
I have never been a big fan of psychiatry because it seems like an exam with no definite answers. But some people rely on psychiatrists to maintain a stable, happy life, so who am I to say? To me, dream interpretation is a lot like psychiatry---plenty of questions with a raft of possible answers, none certain. What Lauri Loewenberg says makes perfect sense, but how can you really know, and even if you do, what can you do about it?
“After your next car dream,” advises Lauri, “sit down and write about something you gained that same day. It needn’t be something big, just any small gain. Make something up if you have to.” I'm going to do it. Maybe I gained someone’s trust or made a guy smile or received a flowery compliment. Everything counts. Maybe tonight I'll lose a five-spot instead of my car.
All things considered, would I call Lauri again if I had it to do over? In a New York minute. She was knowledgeable, funny and helpful. She made me think. And she was in no hurry, the call was approaching thirty minutes when I wound it down, twice as much time as I’d paid for with no hint of being rushed. $45 is cheap for aid to major reflection. Not to mention, I got a story to tell. I knew I would, one way or the other. But I like this story better.
….arrives the creative spark of sleep. Sleep isn’t merely about resting our bodies, it’s about giving our minds the space to explore, discover and create. When we sleep, we open ourselves up to a world of possibilities, allowing our subconscious to connect ideas, find innovative solutions, jab our imaginations. Sleep plays a crucial role in our creative process, especially in the REM stage, when our brains are processing information, consolidating memories and connecting different ideas. This can lead to creative insights and problem-solving abilities that are often impossible to achieve when we’re awake.
Research suggests that the earliest stage of sleep, known as N1 or hypnagogia, is particularly fertile ground for creative insights. This dreamy, half-awake state is where we often experience fleeting, imaginative thoughts before drifting off into deeper sleep. It’s a connection point between our subconscious mind and innovation. Thomas Edison would nap with metal balls in his hands, and as he drifted off, the balls would fall and wake him, allowing him to capture those creative sparks at the edge of consciousness…one of several dream incubation methods used to harness the creative power of sleep. Many writers leave a notebook or recording device at bedside to record their dreams upon waking.
Researchers at MIT and Harvard Medical School have developed a device called Dormio, a wearable glove that tracks signs of sleep and can gently guide dream content. In a 2020 study, they showed that Dormio could effectively guide dreams toward a specific theme. Is this a great idea, or what? Instead of losing your car every night, you could stop in at the Moulin Rouge or head for the beignet counter at Cafe du Monde.
Participants in the study were prompted to dream about trees while wearing the Dormio device. The results showed that those who received these tree prompts were significantly more creative in problem-solving tasks compared to participants who napped without prompting or stayed awake. “One of the goals of our group is to give people more insight into how their brain works, and also what their cognitive state is and how they may be able to influence it, says Pattie Maes, a professor in MIT’s Media Lab and one of the lead researchers in the study. Maybe you’ll even write an iconic ditty.
Legendary songwriter Paul McCartney takes minimal credit for inventiveness when it comes to creating his famous song, Yesterday, which came to him in a dream. He woke up one morning with the melody playing in his head and rushed to a piano to play it before it faded from memory. “I like the melody a lot, but because I dreamed it I have trouble taking credit for writing it,” he says.
James Cameron, director of Avatar, the highest grossing film of all time, confesses it all started as a dream. When Cameron was a young man, he had a very vivid dream about a bioluminescent forest filled with glowing trees and strange, beautiful creatures. The dream stuck with him for years, eventually inspiring the stunning world of Pandora in Avatar.
Maybe Bill shouldn’t give up on his mysterious automobile losses. Just think, BK’s dream cars could be the victims of hovering UFOs which suck them up into their bellies like so many prairie cows in Kansas. Bill could secret himself in the trunk of an appetizing auto and, when the vehicle was safely inside the UFO, pop out and get a few shots with his iPhone camera for his new movie, Coneheads II. Hey, the ETs went along with it for Morons from Outer Space, they’re not so fussy.
That’s all, folks….
bill.killeen094@gmail.com
