Woke up laughing.

Had a good conversation about dreams the other night. One thing I realized during the talk was how great it is to wake up laughing. Have you had dreams like that before?

Most of mine come from dreams about friends and family, and places I've spent time at in the past. I've definitely had a handful in which I woke up laughing thinking I was at Quaker Lake, or at Frontier. These dreams are always fun to have, but bittersweet in that after the clarity of thinking they're real wears off, you're kind of sad when you realize it was just a dream.

How about dreams where you wake up and TRY to fall asleep into again? I've done this before, but it's never easy and usually just out of my reach.

I've also had some crazy ones where I actually HEAR the alarm going off in my dream, and wonder what the hell is making such a loud noise. Those are never fun and always offer a rude awakening.

You can analyze dreams all you want, and some will never make sense. These dreams can be fun and they can be scary. They're usually the easiest to forget.

Nightmares suck. I won't even go into them. We all know how they are.

The complete opposite of nightmares, though, comes in the form of dreams where I've had conversations with lost loved ones. It sounds crazy, but I've had a few of these where I actually TALK to my grandfather. The cool thing is that he's the age he was when he died, but I'm whatever age I am at the time of the dream, so it's like he gets to see me as I get older. What's even more amazing is that, everytime I have a dream where I talk to him, I'm going through a stressful period. My last one was about two years ago, and he gave me advice. He told me that things would work out, even if it didn't seem like it at the time. And they DID. I like to think of these dreams as actual conversations with loved ones. It's like they can reach us directly in our sleep when they need to, and it's definitely a comforting feeling. These dreams always make me cry.

I think I'm going to start a dream log soon. It would be fun to look back at down the road, and who knows what kind of writing material I could get from it, right? We'll see how it goes.

Either way, sweet dreams...
DS.