The Mat Salleh

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine asked a question on Facebook about whether we dream in colour or in black & white.  I answered her that my dreams are usually in colour, unless I dream that I’m in a B&W movie. Someone laughed at my response, and yes it was meant to be a bit silly, but it was also serious.

Since that day I began to crystallize, in my conscious state of mind, the dreams I have been having for the past few years, since I usually recall bits and pieces of dreams. Or sometimes, they just come back to me in a very deja vu kind of moment. Or, sometimes, too, I have the same dreams several times with only slight differences.

The interesting thing that I realised about my dreams is that most of the time, and really, I mean most of the time, they are like movies. When I dream, I dream that I am in some kind of story. When I dream, there are all sorts of people I’ve never met: Europeans, Americans, Australians, Asians, of different shapes and colours and sizes. When I dream, there is usually a soundtrack playing in the background, like a movie. When I dream, there are sound effects, realistic sound effects (the kind that could win an Oscar). When I dream, the characters speak the same way actors would speak in movies, almost real, yet not quite.

I don’t know why, but yes, most of my dreams are like that. Sometimes the people in my dreams, including myself, say words I’ve never heard before. And when I wake up, if I can remember the word, I’d check it up in the dictionary, and most of the time those words exist. Interesting. I learn vocabulary even as I sleep.

And as for the soundtrack, the music is generally well composed and written in my dreams. I can’t tell if those are songs I have heard before somewhere or whether my brain just makes them up as I dream. Either way is very likely and possible.

The dialogues in my dreams are also very similar to scripted dialogues in movies. The people in my dreams speak to each other in the exact same way you observe characters in a movie interact with each other. And most of the time I don’t know who these people are in my dreams. They just, I don’t know, auditioned for my dreams?

The stories I dream of range from car crashes to simple stories about friendship, or planning a rescue. And interestingly, I sometimes even have a narrator in my dreams, just like some movies do.

I am not a dream analyst, and I don’t really bother interpreting dreams. I just enjoy the free movies I get to watch while I sleep.

Dream maker – you heart breaker,
Dom