Is There Anybody Out There?

It seems that there is. While visiting some of my favourite relatives, I met some readers - Jo and Dena (I hope I've spelled that right!)

It seems my cheese fuelled scribblings of insanity are not purely for my own enjoyment, which if nothing else makes me feel a little less indulgent. Although it also did make me realise that I'm not just talking to myself, and therefore feel obliged to provide something more of an explanation of why I'm undertaking this rather bizarre project.

First of all, I'm not really one of those people who thinks that dreams have some sort of special meaning - in my view my dreams are nothing more than a combination of my feelings and experiences processed by my brain when it is in neutral. I know there are some people who think if you have a certain type of dream it means you're anxious or paranoid or whatever, I look at it from the other direction, if you're anxious it will just come out in your dreams.

OK here's the deal, we all spend roughly 25 - 35% of our lives asleep, taking average life expectancy into account, that's around 20 - 25 years. A very long time, just ask someone in prison. Obviously you don't dream the whole time, but it's entirely likely that we spend up to 4 years of our lives in a dream like state.

How many of your dreams can you actually remember? Maybe one from the last few nights, and maybe a handful of others? Given the amount of time in your life you spend dreaming, it's a lot to forget. In many ways, that's the primary personal purpose of this blog for me, to enable me to get more out of my life by recording my dreams which would otherwise be forgotten.

Another reason is that often I will see or hear something that triggers a memory from a dream - sometimes a dream from many years ago, which can be a constant reminder of all the rich experiences were merely just forget because we happened to be asleep. It is my hope that after a while, when I have that experience of remembering a dream, I'll be able to look it up on this blog.

As for the cheese, well that's to try and give the dreams a bit of edge and make them a bit more vivid so they can stand out a bit more. I have had some amazing experiences dreaming on cheese. I'm also hoping (in vain) to start a whole movement of Cheese Surfing.

I would encourage anyone reading to post their own dreams, whether it be here, or by starting their own Cheese Surfing blog. If you would like to post anything here, just let me know in the comments section, and I'll sort a post out for you.