Dreamcatcher

My dreams have been especially vivid lately. The scenarios are the usual stuff--scenes of mild humiliation and discomfort--but they've been rendered with the immediacy and crisp detail of real life. I'm considering starting a dream journal. The trouble with keeping one of those, though, is that you have to start writing immediately upon waking unless you want to lose the dream, but it's hard to write in that bleary and discombobulated state.

I kept a dream journal for a brief spell in college after I saw Oprah talking about it on TV. Around the same time, I was taking a performance class in which one of the assignments was to enact a "reaction to a work of art or a dream." Because that's the way the instructor phrased it, I misunderstood the assignment. I thought the second option was to perform a reaction to a dream, when actually the choices were a.) to perform a dream or b.) to perform a reaction to a work of art. I would argue that the instructor is to blame for speaking without precision, but, then again, I am the only one in the class who didn't get it.

In my performance, I read passages from my dream journal and analyzed the entries in a comically neurotic way, assigning the dreams ever more ridiculous and increasingly menacing meanings. From this distance it sounds godawful, but as I recall, it got a laugh, which is all I was going for anyway.