Saturday, February 20, 2010

Reading in Dreams

I remember a post by Chaka a while back about dreaming a word game he didn't know the rules to, and this made me think of that on some level or another. Your guess is as good as mine.

Last night I had a dream that I was taking a test, and the second question on the test was asking something along the lines of "A man named Nathaniel Bohr used an atom with 5 ... to describe ... blah blah blah ... What is the name of this atom?" (that is all I remember of the question from waking up).

When I first read the question, I had no idea what it was talking about. My first thought was that BORON is the 5th element in the periodic table. Then I looked through the test to see if it contained a periodic table I could reference. When I did not find one I decided to read the question again. The name "Nathaniel Bohr" instantly clued me in on the answer of Bohr's Atom.

Obviously, the facts in the question are all wrong, I have no idea what his first name was, almost definitely not Nathaniel. Secondly, it was not a specific atom but a model for describing atoms. Thirdly, it did not have 5 specifically of anything, it could be used to describe any number of atoms with any number of proton/neutron/electron combinations. etc, etc. But that is NOT the point.

After I realized the answer I started writing it in my answer booklet. I had finished writing the letters "BOHR" (which I specifically remember seeing in big block letters) when I realized I had written on the line for the NEXT question's answer. So I crossed it out and wrote it again "Bohr's Atom" on the correct line. Then I decided to quit taking the test and the dream took a turn for the weird, but that's a different story.

The reasons I posted this dream are
1) I remember specifically reading the question and having NO idea what the answer was at first. I find this interesting, because some part of my own brain had to create this question from scratch, yet another part of my own brain was not able to answer it right away.
2) Second, I remember specifically READING the name "Nathaniel Bohr" along with READING the rest of the question a second time. Do you ever remember READING in a dream? For some reason I thought READING was impossible in a dream. Usually what happens to me is I see some scribble of jumbled text-like drawings and just KNOW what it's trying to say. In this case, I actually remember READING the english words, not a jumble of text.
3) I very distinctly remember the big block letters spelling "BOHR" which, like part 2, is something I've never remembered in a dream before. Maybe I'm just not thinking back enough or remembering enough other dreams, but there were actual letters representing an actual word which actually stood for something in the real world. And not only did I READ it, but I was also WROTE that word "BOHR" letter-by-letter on the wrong line in the answer booklet. And then I crossed it out and wrote again: "Bohr's Atom" on the correct line.

I don't know about you folks, but I found it all interesting enough to post here.

1 comment:

Chaka said...

I just realized that I replied to this on facebook, which is where you are not.

I don't remember ever reading real letters and words in dreams. Everything is just gibberish scribbles.