PREFACE: This rant is more of a rambling. It is serious in nature, and true as well, but may not seem that way. You can totally skip this one if you want.

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Jazz is one of my favorite kinds of music. Whenever I listen to it, I just soak it all in...it's quite amazing actually. Whenever I listen to it, the gears in my head begin turning and turning, and I begin to think. My mind often wanders when listening to jazz if I'm not focusing on one particular thing, and I always have fun trying to figure out how I got to thinking about what I ended up thinking about. One of the things I thought of tonight while at the jazz concert was dreams. The idea of dreams and what they are and mean is truly perplexing. Psychologists and biologists still argue about it. I met a person recently who claims he has never remembered a dream in his life, and I have met others who remember most every dream. I know some people who feel dreams are symbolic and others who don't. It's rather odd, actually. There are so many different ideas on dreams, that it can be easy to get confused. So, if you want, you may stop reading right now, for I can assure you that this rant will clear nothing up.

Now, I will admit that at times I think dreams are symbolic and have meaning...but not most of the time. Most of the time mine are really random. The only common theme I could ever discover was that my dreams tend to take places I am used to and distort them in some odd way. I've had dreams where the residence halls were set up in a maze-type fashion or where malls connect stores in the most bizarre ways. I have had dreams of gigantic basements and movie theaters that require really creepy elevators (we'll get to that in a bit...) and I've had dreams where schools fuse and aren't fully how I remember them.
Anyway, random stuff seems to happen. Whether I am the hero, the outsider, the random person saying "hey you kids get off my cow" or whatever, they are very inconsistent...most of the time...

I have had two dreams that I can remember that I would argue had some meaning to them. One I had on the night between New Year's Eve and New Year's Day in 2007-2008, and the other was just this summer. The first one I would say was significant and a sign or a really creepy coincidence...anyway, fighting zombies will never be the same to me. The other dream...well...the first parts of Fugue Island are up...you can read an edited version of the dream through those.
Speaking of which, I love my dreams because they give me ideas of what to write about. Fugue Island is one example (I'm basing that off of a lot of my dreams...) and Three Brothers (a story that I doubt any of you have read despite its easy accessibility) is the intro to a novel I would love to write (or see written) based upon an odd dream I had. In fact, the dream is only part of the actual story, but it wouldn't have had an ending if I left it as it was...

Some of my dreams actually are explainable by some techniques. For example, on explanation of why we dream is that we are processing recent events through our brain and it makes stories with them. That would explain the dream I had Thursday night. I'll actually type out the gist of it here, and then explain how it can be explained.

At the Civic Opera House...I think...not quite sure. They have the fast elevators that go to high up floors like the Opera House does at least...Anyway, I hop in one and hit the button for the top floor. The doors close and it starts going...and it's going faster and faster...I can feel it as it somehow leaves the shaft. It feels like it is tumbling down some stairs...and it stops. The doors open and the elevator is upright. I walk out, and immediately regret it. A shadowy figure straps me to a table and tilts it so I am somewhat upright. I can now see that we are in some very large basement and that there are a lot of people on tables like this. The shadowy figure rolls out a TV and the guy from Saw comes on and says some things that I didn't quite catch. The shadowy figure reappears and steps into the light, and I can see now that it is Heath Ledger's The Joker. The Joker and the guy from Saw begin to harass us one by one. They wheel the tables toward a corner in a makeshift line, and as I get closer, I can see that people are being forced to play puzzle games. The guy in front of me fails to meet the time limit and gets his left foot cut off. I then wake up (right before my turn).

Now, taking this as a whole can be a tad confusing. However, the fusion of three (or even four) recent events helps to explain it. First, the elevator can be explained from Monday, when the Jamaican and I biked to Taco Bell and he insisted on taking the elevator up to our floor. He even tried to drag me into it. I took the stairs and beat him up. The part about the torture and Saw can be explained by the AA meeting, where we discussed Saw when talking about violent media outlets, such as Saw and GTA. The Joker can be explained by when I was telling Derek about last year's talent show, and the puzzles can be explained by a movie I watched based upon the Professor Layton games (you know the one...its on the front page...). Fuse these four things and my dream makes pretty good sense.

Most of my dreams don't exactly work like this, but I guess this one does really well. In fact, it makes more sense than most of my dreams despite how overtly odd it was at the time. I guess what I am trying to say is that you can analyze some dreams...in a way...and they can make some sense. This won't work for all of them though. I guess this was just a confusing waste of time, but I did warn you.
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