I had a dream about you

While not my exact words, I pretty much said the title of this blog post to somebody yesterday.

The day before, that somebody and I were talking over Facebook chat about food, lots of it, and so the dream I had that night was basically a rerun of our conversation. However, instead of the 2 of us sitting behind our respective computers using the internet to talk to one another, we were sitting at a table together eating all of the food that we were talking about. I relayed these details to her the next time I caught her on Facebook chat, and her response was: "That's scary Em".

Reflecting on that line, I have a bit of trouble trying to understand what was so scary about my dream; it's not as if we were eating in the dark while a serial killer was lurking in the shadows. The thing is, this isn't the first time I've got that reaction out of people when telling them about the dreams I have.

I can trawl through some of my old e-mails from work and find one where I told a friend she was in dream of mine where she found herself lost in some weird dimension and had to be rescued by a crew that consisted of her husband, myself, and the rappers from what I believe were 50 Cent's G-Unit. Her reaction: she thought it was scary. (Re-reading that paragraph, I think that one qualifies as scary in the 'horror' sense of the word.)

I can also remember telling one of my mates about a dream of mine he was in (can't remember the dream unfortunately) to which he responded by telling me that that's pretty scary, before telling my my head's all fucked-up.

Thinking about those and other incidents, I'm not really sure what constitutes the 'scary' part of my dreams. Is it scary in the uncanny sense that I can recall my dreams or put people I know into such strange scenarios, or is it scary in the sense that I should be admitted into a mental hospital for what my mind is capable of coming-up with when I'm asleep?

Seeing as my dreams are often influenced by the things in my day I'm not too surprised to find my friends or others who make up my day in them. I've also always had a pretty good imagination, and after hanging-out with anybody long enough I can imagine them in any situation with almost any expression or emotion (I once had a school friend cry in my dream even though I had never seen them cry before). I mean, we all have that ability where, when we read some words from someone (either in a text or an e-mail), we put their voice to the words and imagine it as if they were reading to us. I'd like to think my dreams are just an extension of this ability.

This ability of mine does seem to fall short in one department however: Scottish accents.

I've always had trouble replicating the voices of Scottish actors/actresses in my head. This is particularly annoying when there's all those great Sean Connery movies and there's Scotty from Star Trek with all those great lines. I fail in this department because, when trying to recall their voices, they always end-up sounding more like pirates.

That's right. Pirates.

What's even worse is that now I've made a Scottish friend (previously dubbed 'laundry lass') whom I e-mail more often than I actually see in-person, and my imagination always makes their reading-to-me voice devolve into pirate 'arrs' and 'yarrs'. They even featured in a dream of mine several weeks ago; their voice, after a while, became too hilarious in my own dream that it caused me to wake-up in a fit of laughter.

So much for nightmares forcing a person awake to escape a frightening situation; here's me being forced awake to escape a terribly imagined accent.

Maybe I am a scary individual after all.