Return to Sleep
Thoughts
Ideas in our
Sleep
There is a popular misconception that our
brains shut down while we sleep. This could not be further from
the truth as the human brain continues crunching information
during our slumber. Some information gleaned from our
previous wake state is discarded while other items we
experienced are filed into our non-volatile memory. While
all of this brain activity is going on, nature has given us
the wonderful gift of dreaming to keep us preoccupied.
Our dreams bring us symbol ridden images that are
'user specific'.
Just as the things you will dream about are very distinctly
'you', ideas that present themselves to you in a dream
are uniquely your own. Here is an example of an idea
that came to me in a dream.
I
own a Siamese cat named Oscar... or should I say he owns me? He is a very bright, impish
and willful feline who is not given to cuddling or other
such cattish behavior. He likes to play, eat and irritate me
by wanting to talk at all hours of the night. I love him
dearly. Recently he was gifted a cat bed. Just a basic bed
with rolled up edges and made out of faux sheep fur. He took
to it immediately. He stays in it for hours, quite
often 'kneading doe' on the fake sheepskin, purring quite
loudly and, in general, acting like a contented kitty and
not the devilish monkey-cat I am used to. Many nights ago I
had a dream. I saw Oscar with another cat... which I
assumed to be his mother. Oscar was laying next to the much
bigger feline and, as I approached, the bigger cat morphed
into a cat bed. These things will happen in dreams. I woke
up thinking... what a cool idea! A cat bed, made out of
furry material, that looks like a big cat. I jotted the idea
down in my sleep journal, clicked 'play' on my CD, a fell
back asleep listening to Jumbo
Jet. A few
days later I was reviewing my Sleep Journal for ideas I
could write about here. I saw my note about the cat bed
idea. By this time I had forgotten about the idea completely
as generic dreams have a tendency to not be remembered in
the long term. This note, this memento, jogged my
memory of the event and reinvigorated my feeling that it
really was a good idea... for someone in the cat (or dog)
bed business.
I photoshopped a facsimile of my dream
idea:
I have a visceral sense that
a product like this would be successful in the cat bed
market. I also know I will never make this cat
bed. I do not have the skill set that could even produce the
prototype. I can't sew. But I still believe we should pay
attention to ideas that come to us in our dreams and I keep
a dream journal at my bedside for just that reason.
My cat Oscar:
Brad McBride
Comments?
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