Dreams of You

          Chances are, if I know you, you have made guest appearances or cameos in my dreams throughout the years. Assuming that a dream has everything to do with the dreamer, our imaginations nevertheless choose certain people to play certain roles or characters, usually for reasons we can't fathom. The Jungians say that if I dream about you, I'm not dreaming about you, but using an idea of you to represent something in me. But the Jungians haven't been the only ones with an interest in understanding dreams throughout human history, nor surely do they have a corner on interpretation. The brain's dream creation process is a mystery. We have recurring themes, recurring dreams, recurring characters, and dreams that might connect to a series of dreams going back many years, even to childhood. We have vivid dreams that we remember all our lives. We have places we revisit that connect to previous dreams yet seem to push forward the story or the narrative. I'm not entirely convinced I am the dreamer rather than the dream.
          Why does our mind select certain people to make these appearances, these cameos? Sometimes it's fairly obvious: maybe we've been worried, obsessed, in love, missing, or afraid of someone. Other times our dreams seem to pluck obscure people from out past, people we might not consciously remember or ever think about, to play some role. It always interesting to, upon waking, to try to make sense of it all, and sometimes to delve deeper, attempting some kind of interpretation.
          Other people's dreams, we all know, can be as boring as hell to listen to; however, if you have made an appearance in someone's dream, your interest in hearing about it spikes at least a little. I therefore have an immodest proposal: What if I told you when you appeared in a dream of mine, and described the role you played? What if you told me? What if we created a network of people sharing these dream appearances via email, or a dream networking site specifically designed for this? The purpose would not be to bore one another with elaborate descriptions of bizarre dreams, to insult, seduce, or otherwise vex one another, but to analyze how we use our ideas of others in the dream creation process. Perhaps acquire some additional self-awareness, or even other-awareness. There would always be a risk of dishonesty, manipulation, or downright creepiness, so honesty and a certain degree of modesty and circumspection would be required. Nor should people bother utter strangers, say, Brad Pitt, Obama, or Olivia Munn (well, we could make some exceptions) with word of a dream cameo.
          If we are indeed six mere degrees of separation from any other human being on earth in reality, it seems there is no such separation in dreams. Why? Is there some pool of (to be Jungian again) collective unconscious we all draw from? Perhaps we could even learn something about this.
          I'm going to continue to toss this idea around and think about an app or site that could provide such a venue. It's probably utterly impractical, but I do wonder. If you run with this and develop the software, all I ask is that, should it become a gold mine, you cut me in for a small royalty. This is the stuff of dreams.