The Unauthorized Autobiography of a Dream Interpreter

It wasn't long ago that I awoke very early one morning, long before dawn, with an uncomfortable sense that I had been having someone else's dreams, dreams that were utterly and completely foreign to me. In the dreams, I seemed to know many of the people with whom I was interacting and I 'knew' they were family and friends. But I also knew they weren't, not really. In this dream, I had the odd sensation that I was 'listening in on' someone else's experiences. On the one hand, I knew these interactions, these memories that I was having were not mine, but on the other hand, there was a certain degree of familiarity...like all these people were cousins I met briefly as a kid, but with whom I didn't keep in touch.

This particular dream has sufficiently faded from my conscious memory that I cannot recall enough detail to really 'get it.' But I do have a feeling that maybe, just maybe, there are principles of physics that I do not understand that can, when the temperature or humidity or magnetic fields of the earth are just right, cause misfires of the synapses. Or, perhaps, the electronic impulses that map out our thoughts and our memories and our dreams might be inexplicably intercepted...or perhaps ricochet is a better analogy...by other electronic impulses that, like a spinning billiard ball, propel the original electronic impulses off in odd directions, causing them to either peter out and die or, on occasion, to merge with another impulse that is in the process of coursing through someone else's brain. Hence, a dream that seems to belong to someone else.

Am I crazy? I think not. I'm not suggesting this is a cosmic plan, only that random misfirings of your personal electrical impulses (you, the salmon farmer in Chile or the software engineer in Bellevue or the Islamic cleric in Omaha) that trigger thought, etc. might go awry and, against the odds, land in the brain of a little girl who removes the pits of olives in a tiny village in Greece. And that poor little girl might have a dream in which the distinct odors of fish is coupled with an image of Michelle Bachelet on television...or that Bill Gates' retirement party is announced right in the middle of a webinar on the topic of corporate responsibility in an age of religious fanaticism...or that plans for the first Islamic embroidery class in Omaha are announced from speakers blaring from each corner of the mosque.

I'll ask again. Am I crazy? I suppose it depends on who you're talking to. And about. And who you are. And whether you subscribe to my world view. And whether you remember to pack antiperpirant on important business trips.