My Two Cents

The cover story of this week's U.S. News & World Report, entitled "What Dreams Are Made Of," seeks to make sense of our dream lives based on evidence gleaned from studies of the human brain using today's technology. The article was interspersed with a few interesting stories about celebrities having discovered or created something in a dream, which they then put to use upon awakening. My favorite: the tune for "Yesterday" came to John Lennon in a dream in May 1965. "At first, lacking lyrics, he improvised with 'Scrambled eggs, oh my baby, how I love your legs.'" (This becomes doubly funny when you start singing these words to the well-known melody, and equally annoying when it gets stuck replaying in your head all day.)

The article also included several narratives of dream sequences as provided by everyday individuals to UCSC scientists. Their databank of approximately 16,000 dreams is available on-line. I went to check it out and let the computer pull up a random dream for me to read. How eerie that this is the one I was given:

John Lennon and Paul McCartney were sitting on the floor in a hallway. They were on the second floor of their mansion. They were young with looks as if it were the late 1960's. Occasionally, George Harrison walked by and said something, but mostly John and Paul were there. Sitting next to them was a cameraman filming them. He was about their age. John and Paul kept getting annoyed with him and they'd push him by the forehead, so that he'd fall on his back. John had a guitar, and they were singing and writing a new song. They decided to live and sleep there, in the hall, naked, except for shorts made out of paper bags, with leg holes cut out of them, and the bag going up to their chests. They had a pillow inside it for a cushion to sit on. Then they poured Ruffles potato chips in their paper bag shorts, and crushed them by sitting on them. They laughed, and declared that it was for some unknown political cause.