in dreams begin responsibilities.

i am tired. wicked tired. so tired that i forgot to put a period on the end of my last post's subject line.

but before i go to bed at this ridiculously early hour, i wanted to mention dreams and the subconscious. these topics have come up, in some form or another, in a number of conversations that i've had this week. i've been talking with MomCat about the idea of a collective unconscious, and whether there might be anything to that. i've been talking with friends about the dreams they've recently had that have been affecting them in some way or another.

i'm certain that i'm not the first person to have the revelation that "wow, dreams are interesting." what i like about considering dreams, though, is that it's never stagnant - you always have some new dreams to think about, some you forget, some that other people tell you about that remind you of ones you once had, etc. there are always weird connections to make, connotations to consider. i make no claims about understanding the true nature of dreams (was freud right? jung? what about miss cleo?), and that makes it hard to make any claims about what a certain dream might mean. but damn if it isn't interesting to try to figure out, right?

for instance, i dream a fair amount about my grandparents' old house. we spent a fair amount of time there as kids, so it's a locale and a landscape with which i'm viscerally familiar. my grandparents both died about ten years ago, and i've only driven by the house a few times since them, but it keeps popping up in my dreams. recently i dreamt (dreamed? dreamt? who cares, see "wicked tired" notation above), all in the same dream, that there was a business meeting and a college party at the house, and then an inspection of the trees on the property, and then at the end of the dream i realized the house was ringed with a garden of rotting vegetables.

strange? yes. hard to deconstruct? perhaps not. but it's fascinating to me that this one location keeps factoring into my dreams, especially since i tend to dream in unspecific locales, bizarro dream spaces where places and people are constantly shifting. but these particular dreams are very rooted there.

anyway. maybe some more on this later. this stuff also got me thinking tonight about what the scariest dream that i ever had was. i think there's actually two - i'll tell you about them later, when i'm not so tired and rambling.

but first, tell me about your scariest dream....