All I have to do is dream

Dreams are interesting! No doubt about it!

I've heard that dreams represent what lurks just below what we think of while awake. They can foreshadow - by putting together clues that we already have conscious knowledge of. And they can redo past events based on clues we should've put together long ago.

When I woke up this morn, I could clearly recall 4 dreams I had last night. For the life of me, I can only remember 3 of them now, but they sure do pib!

A recurring dream I've had for years involves some manner of defecting from my first high school and finding a better school before too much damage can be done. I think this shows just how close it came to happening in real life.

This wasn't the theme of last night's dreams, but 2 of them did involve teenage troubles. The first one involved me (in my current adult life) amassing a large group of people to raid an abusive teenage confinement facility and successfully freeing all the detainees who were unjustly held there.

The second one involved me (as a teenager) almost being sent to a right-wing religious prep school in Chicago after an article about it appeared in the paper. I'm sure this was based partly on a positive article I saw recently about such a school in another city.

Another dream wasn't related to teen woes, however. In this dream, I was on a family outing and found a Tresler Comet gas station. Taken by surprise at seeing a gas station chain that had long ago vanished, I tried photographing it, but the camera's batteries were dead. So I went to a nearby Kroger to buy new batteries, and a clerk (a woman who was about 60) told me the store only sold partially spent batteries. The exception was 'D' batteries. She told me the store sold fresh 'D' batteries "to see if they can float."

It remains unclear why anyone would want to know if batteries can float, why fresh batteries would be more likely to float than used batteries, or why they had to be in a store to see whether they could float.

The only thing I know of in real life that may have influenced that dream was that I recently saw an old news photo that featured a Tresler Comet.

Dreams must be interpreted to sift through what's realistic and what isn't. If something in a dream seems unrealistic or ill-advised if taken literally, it may have symbolic value. Maybe it means we should swallow batteries to see if they get pooped out as floaters.

Or maybe not.