Guest Blog: Fail Dreams by Carl Purdon

I am surrounded by such great dreamers, creative thinkers, and teachers – from whom all I glean so much – that I decided it would be wonderful to have them share their dreaming experiences via guest blogs.

First up: Carl Purdon, published author, robust blogger, and great dreamer.

Carl calls his blog Fail Dreams, but I see in here a great victory that is perfectly illustrative of one of the ways we can use dreams to overcome blocks in our life. Keep your eyes peeled for the “myth disproved” line.

Carl – THANK YOU!

Fail Dreams

I’ve always been an active dreamer. Ideas come to me in dreams. Ideas for stories, characters, and situations, for example, usually can be traced back to a dream. I can’t imagine being a writer and not dreaming. There is a correlation there — writing and dreaming. Whenever I take a break from writing, which is almost always due to time constraints, my dreams become more intense. The only way to throttle them is to write.

Dreams also help me solve problems. I can’t count how many times I have solved some work-related issue during sleep. Sometimes I remember the dream. Other times I simply wake up with the solution in my head.

Rarely a night goes by that I don’t have at least one dream I remember. Most nights there are several. Very often I wake up several times between dreams. I don’t recall a time when I’ve slept through the night without waking. On the heavy-dream nights I can feel the tiredness when I awake. I don’t know if this is mental exhaustion or not, but it does seem to be proportional to the intensity of the dreams I can recall. On the rare occasion that I wake up without remembering any dreams, I feel refreshed and rested.

I’ve often found myself wishing there was a dream-blocking drug I could take to get the restful nights I so rarely experience. I would use the drug sparingly, though, because my dreams are such a large part of who I am.

Once I dreamed I awoke from a dream, only to find that I was still dreaming. I awoke from that dream and it felt really strange, like a shock to the system. Then I actually did wake up. I don’t know exactly what that was, but it was quite unnerving. I call it my 3-deep dream. Thankfully it has only happened once.

When I was a kid my older brother told me if I ever dreamed I was falling, and hit the ground, I would die. I believed him, and somehow always managed to wake up during the fall. One night I didn’t wake up. I hit the ground and bounced high into the air, then hit and bounced again, like a ball. I woke up alive. Myth disproven.

Then there are the reoccurring dreams. They are what I call my “fail” dreams. I have three that reoccur on a fairly regular basis and are almost always the same. In one, I suddenly realize I haven’t been home in a long time. When I get home my house is falling apart. Sometimes the roof is caved in and the floors are rotted. Other times it’s just closed up and empty. In the second, I am working at a former job. It was a factory job with rotating shifts. A good job, but one I would hate to have to go back to. The third dream has me back in my senior year of high school. It’s almost time for graduation and I realize I haven’t been to class in a long time. I’ve missed so much school I can’t even find my classrooms, or my locker, and am afraid I won’t graduate. Sometimes, in the dream, I realize I’ve already graduated and ask myself why I’m back, but I never have the answer. I was an A/B student in school and rarely missed, so I’m not sure what that one means.

Perhaps the strangest dreams are the ones in which I become lucid. Sometimes I am able to steer them, but in most cases I’m just along for the ride. Unable to shake myself fully awake and get away from it.

The most vivid dream I’ve ever had was of a ghost. Both of my kids had described seeing the same ghost when they were kids. Both saw this ghost in the bathroom that connects to our master bedroom. The ghost was a girl with red hair. One night I dreamed I felt someone standing over me and opened my eyes to see a girl with red hair. She pounced on my chest and started clawing at my eyes. I woke up fighting her. It was so real because there was no before or after that I can recall. Just her standing there, then attacking.

That doesn’t mean I believe in ghosts, but I don’t think I went back to sleep that night.

I don’t claim to know the meaning of my dreams. Some are obvious. Some not so much. I’ll leave the interpretations to the experts, like Dr. Buckner. All I know is I would rather dream than not. Too much creativity derives from them to wish them away.