On writing a dream narrative

Here it is, on just my second day of recording my dreams, and the difficulty of recording the dreams and making any sense to readers other than Leslie is near-impossible.  I mean, yes, I can write the dream in such a way that anyone can understand the narrative, but the intricacies of the dream connections and content will be lost without a ton of annotation. The really funny things will not be obvious.  It has always been evident to me that the brain has this wonderful and entertaining capacity to synthesize life experience and spin tails out of it that do make a whole lot of sense to me, the dreamer, but to you, the reader, will mean diddly.  So, I have come to some conclusions.


First, I love having a partner!  I love Leslie!  I realized that every weird little thing in my dream, she would recognize and get.  Leslie understands and generally shares my sense of humor so I know she will appreciate that what might read like a nightmare is, in fact, really a black comedy.  That's a wonderful feeling, to be known. 

The second conclusion I came to is that I will have to pick out of my nightly dreams the content that can easily be grasped by anyone in this culture  and leave the things I find most interesting—the morphing of friends, the synthesizing of multiple experiences into a meaningful-only-to-me scene—on the cutting room floor.  I don't expect people will read my dreams, but come on, if you do I want it to be a good experience.

The third conclusion contradicts the second.  I am going to do a little annotation at the bottom of each dream just in case you want to get the references that I make. (I am also doing it for me for the future if I reread these because I may have forgot some of the annotated bits.) It won't have much depth and I will leave out much salient information for privacy reasons.  But, if there is anyone who wants to know how my particular mind works, it will have relevant additions. I back-edited yesterday's dream with annotations.