Remember that face you saw in the coffee line about nine days ago? You know the one. They ordered that one drink, turned around and passed you without so much as a nod to notice your existence. Remember their face in the dream you had last night? The one you were recounting when remembering who was in your dream and the person with teddy bear stuck to their hand wasn’t familiar in the slightest. Isn’t that annoying? Well, our brains cannot just randomly generate a whole face, it picks up from the faces we see even in day-to-day life. Best part is: we see thousands of faces in our lives and constantly have fodder…I mean faces to have show up in our dreams. Maybe that’s just creepy now that I type it out.
A few nights ago I was thinking about this odd, yet cool, occurrence in every single one of our lives. To me, it’s fascinating to think about the brain and the power it has. Perhaps it’s why many of us are so good at remembering faces and, in my case and many of my friends, not so much at names. Then…the unbelievably weird thought occurred to me as well: if I see other people I’ve only seen passing by in my dreams, the same obviously occurs with others but about me and my mug. I wonder what I did in those dreams now too. I wonder that, when they thought of who was in the dreams amongst friends and loved ones, they saw my face and had to think to themselves, “who was that guy? Why was he holding a pitchfork?” or something along those lines, I don’t care to know what some random person was dreaming. I just prefer if they stop dreaming about me because I find it creepy.
So the next time you wake up in the middle of the night or at five in the morning and recount who was in your dream, just know you might’ve seen that person in the coffee line, on the street on the way to a party your rad friend is throwing…or even the dude you flipped off on the freeway two days ago. Now when you ask yourself, “who the **** was that person?” you probably don’t know them, but have just seen them. Now save yourself the trouble of finding out who they were and get out of bed because you woke up late and have a forty minute commute.
This was an interesting idea I was thinking perhaps I should share with my readers because it’s imperative (in my belief) to understand our brains as well as we can. As for dreams: sure, I guess. Anyway, I’m going to sleep tonight, maybe I’ll see you there. You’ll be the one yelling at my fourth grade self for doing yet another dumb thing, sorry about him, he was the worst. I’ll wake up and think to myself, “who the heck was that?” and go back to sleep because it’s too much a hassle to start thinking who’s who that early in the day.
