Strange Bedfellows

What you see in dreams is often far fetched enough to allow you the knowledge that this  experience is, indeed, a dream. With that awareness comes awareness that you will, later, upon achieving full wakefulness, forget the dream.But there are other times, when the border becomes blurred and you go full-self into believing what you're seeing.

Belief here is the key, When you awaken, you are able to recall significant amounts of the encounter, enough to note on paper or within these speculative paragraphs you call a blog, A neologism, blog is the shortened web log, which in your case is often attempts to hash out remembered details of dreams.

An interesting, memorable reversal of the process also works its way into the speculative parts of your approaches to story writing.. Sometimes you open up a line of thought that strikes some resonant chord, sending visions of you into your dreams, mulling over the implications of what you've written here, going over the possibilities, sending you down various paths until you awaken, either to make written notes or with the absolute certainty that you will not forget the end product, which is insight.

You've read enough material you consider as reliable sources of dream commentary to believe some aspects of dreaming are not intended by your brain to be remembered. You may store the implications of dreams in some vault or celler, and the fact of having experienced them will have accomplished their intent. In the same sense that you do not need to know the details of the process of, say, your skin regenerating that burned patch when, reaching for a piece of toast shoved too far back in the electric oven, you burned a small speck of skin. Ouch, but no big deal; certainly no big deal about whether the burned area would scab, the scab would fall off, and new skin would reappear.

In every case, sleep and dreams work remarkable effects on your writer;y visions. You are comfortable with the effects, not in the least minding when, on those days when your dreams are more insistant in their focus, you spend a few hours suspended in an in-between state, with sleep on one side and being awake on the other.  

Sleep, dreams, and their mechanics fascinate you, even though you've grown up in a writing culture where it is considered a no-no to write in detail about the effects of sleep or dreams upon a character. The reason behind that injunction holds such writing to be boring. 

Franz Kafka understood this in The Metamorphosis. "After a night of uneasy dreams--" is as far as he takes the matter, believing, as you do, that the reader will have had enough experience with uneasy dreams to not require a fuller explanation.

Same holds with prayers. You can say of a character, he or she recited The Twenty-third Psalm, confident most readers will know what you're talking about.  You do not have to supply the text of The Twenty-third Psalm, or even "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want." 

Using similar logic, you do not have to say He or She dreamed, then give the details, as though you were writing a screenplay. You could throw in an adjective such as Kafka did--"a night of uneasy dreams; you not only could but should stop there.

These elections do not intend to impart any more mystery to dreams and sleep than already exist. Both, as they exist in human behavior, are the products of millions of years of evolution. What is now for certainty about both has gone a good way to helping us get a better handle on ourselves as individuals who have found some profit in being rational for a percentage of a given day, with the promise that some optimal balance may eventually found between the rational and the speculative.

Dreams, blogging, writing, and rational behavior may well be--pun intended--strange bedfellows, but at least, so far as you are concerned, you are a strange bedfellow. Your goal is to find out how you are even more strange than you may have caught and to effect some comfortable relationship with it.