The other night I had the weirdest dream. I was getting married, but I had to stop Kanye West from collaborating with Nike before I got married, because he was creating the worst looking snapbacks you could ever imagine. For starters, this is weird because Kayne West made a shoe with Adidas, and not only this, but these hats were SOOOO BAD looking. I mean honestly, considering that I understand color theory and took graphic design for two years, the fact that my brain was able to come up with something this atrocious looking haunts me. The memory of this hat is engrained in the “shame” category in my brain. Make sense? Cool. Well, all I really remember is standing in front of Mr. West and screaming, “THESE GREEN HATS LOOK STUPID, KANYE.” After this, I don’t really remember what happened, but I’d like to think that Kanye West was so happy that I changed his mind from making the worst hats in the world that he rapped at my wedding reception for free. (And no, I never dreamt who I was being betrothed to, I just know it was happening, and I HAD to stop Kanye from making the hats before she [whomever she was] walked down that aisle so I could dance happily to "Good Life" whilst wearing a bow-tie.)
As soon as I woke up, I was left wondering, “what on earth just happened???” So I did a little research. According to “The Complete Idiot’s Guide: Dream Dictionary”, when a person dreams about getting married, they’re getting ready for a big life change. As it turns out, this is entirely true. I’m about to graduate college (it only took me 6 years because the first two I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life—see above when talking of two years of graphic design), and will soon be moving to a brand new town. My thoughts recently have been overcome with finding a place to live, figuring out health insurance, and thinking of the joys of paying off college debt (I’m using the word “joys” pretty loosely here). So considering how I had this crazy dream does make sense, but then I started wondering, why we dream in the first place?
It turns out that nobody really knows why we dream. There are definitely some top theories on why, the main ones being that dreams help us learn about our physical needs and heal from emotional needs, or helping form memory processing and having better memory storage only to name a few. We only “know” (and by know I mean have a slight idea of) why certain dreams happen because psychologists bring together data from counseling, based on patients' dreams, while understanding what was going on in their life at the time of the dream. So really the study of dreams isn't even an exact science, but it’s more of a guess. If I’m being honest, the fact that we have no idea why we dream (or yawn for that matter. Seriously. Look it up. We don’t get why we yawn with 100% certainty. WE HAVE SMARTPHONES BUT WE STILL DON'T UNDERSTAND THIS. WHAT IS HAPPENING???) kind of drives me crazy. At the same time, however, it makes me lean into wonder.
Maybe weird dreams happen because we have things to write about, like the time we told Kanye West to quit designing goofy-looking hats. Maybe we dream to heal or learn about our needs. Maybe we dream to help maintain our memories. Maybe we dream to awaken the wonder to the world around us, as well as the things we don't understand. Who knows? All I know is, sometimes we all have weird dreams.