Dreams

I listened to this wonderful episode of Radio Lab about sleeping. It was super interesting. It talked about why we sleep. How our sleeping is different than other animals. In particular, with many animals only half their brains are asleep at a given time. Anyway, it made me want to try to use sleeping to figure out some homework problems that I'd been working on lately. So for my last two waking hours I immersed myself in my complex analysis and particularly this problem that I'd been wanting to solve. Then I went to bed. I definitely had dreams about the problem and sporadically I woke up with a possible answer to the problem. Turns out each attempt was garbage. So I just ended up with a bad night's sleep and a lot of failed attempts at a complex analysis problem.

I also read a news article about how people who grew up watching black and white TV were more likely to have black and white dreams, even today. While people who grew up with color TV were more likely to have color dreams So basically black and white TV completely changed our dreams and now color TV is sending us back into the stone age dream-wise.

So, the next couple nights I had bizarre dreams. The first night I had a dream that there was this rampant new canine disease. I gave dogs the ability to stretch and change shape (much like one of the superheros in the fantastic four). It had a downside though that it caused the dogs to want to each little children. There also was this particularly bad dog named Studs Turkel (he's apparently the father of the modern radio interview...and in the dream the name may have been Stubs). Well, Studs was well known for stretching such that he looked like a jungle gym and waiting for the unsuspecting child. There was also some old lady in the dream who was housing and hiding these diseased animals in her house that looked just like Sirius Black's house from the Harry Potter movies. Interestingly enough this dream was very cartoony.

Here's a drawing of Studs Turkel:



I forgot the dream that I had the next night, but pretend that story was followed by another particularly weird dream.