I have.  Quite a few actually.  Including one magnum opus.  Alas, it was only in my dreams, though.  It is a very strange sensation writing a song in one’s sleep.  There is this clarity to those dreams that goes well beyond the clarity one normally feels in dream time.

Last night, I wrote a catchy pop song.  The refrain was a refrain that people would find themselves humming as they go about their day.  The verses were poignant and moving.  And the bridge, oh, the bridge!  It was a soaring homage to hope and remembrance.  Ok, there actually wasn’t a bridge that I recall, but since I was getting all melodramatic I thought I’d continue for a while.

Like all dreams, there was this moment of absolute recall as I transitioned from asleep to awake.  And like all dreams, as I bit down into that most succulent looking dish, it turns to ashes in my mouth and all is forgotten.

I have a love/hate relationship with dreams.  Mostly love.  But I hate the losing of the dream.  The greatest invention of all time will be the device that can translate dreams into words and images and sound.  Get cracking neurophysicists!  I have dreams to recall!

Last night, I had one of my recurring dreams.  Well, nightmare really.  I don’t have this dream very often and I have no idea if it actually means anything, but it’s a really interesting experience.  I am probably the only person in the world that enjoys nightmares.

I’m not sure, but there may be a sleep paralysis component to this nightmare.  In it, I am always sleeping in bed when I feel a force holding me down.  When I try to get up, I can only move so much.  I can raise my hands, but only so far before they hit an invisible barrier.  I can push against that barrier with all my might, but it does not budge.  It doesn’t really feel like a barrier, though.  It feels more like a presence.  My cat, Lindy, tries to help me, but she runs into the barrier as well.  I get to see her in some very strange poses in mid air as she fights against the presence.  When I had a dog, he would try and fail to help me against the presence.  The dream continues like this until I wake up.

I also had a dream last night that my mom was part of some elaborate “Ocean’s Eleven” type heist.  I happened to run into her in a parking garage just as she was trying to escape from said heist.  For no good reason, I started running away with her until we ran into the SWAT team at the entrance to the garage.  We then ran back to my car and hid in there.  A SWAT guy with a shotgun noticed us in the car and pushed the car back into a steeply sloping pit that was, for whatever reason, located in the parking garage.  The rest of the dream was me trying to gain control of the car as we’re descending quite quickly down into this pit of the unknown.  Then I wake up.

No, not the job you wish you had instead of your boring, dead end job.  When you dream at night, do you ever dream that you have a strange job?

Last night, I was a buyer for a convenience store in a very trendy location across the street from some really weird looking art deco high rises.  I was instructed to go to the warehouse and purchase some unique items that would sell well for this area.  When I asked for further instructions on what I should buy and how much, I was told that it’s my job to know this and to get out there and do it.

So I head out to the warehouse which is both really close by and incredibly far away in a way that is only possible in dreams and it’s this huge building surrounded by similar huge buildings.  Inside, it’s like the warehouse at the end of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” with giant shelving units stretching to the ceiling and disappearing into the fog in the distance.  The shelves are almost exclusively filled with these weird crystalline statues of various shapes and sizes.  I decide to buy a few different versions of the crystalline statues and bring them back to the store.

It was at this time that a song came into my head and I started singing it.  I can’t remember what the song was anymore, but it was a pretty popular one.  It was just the refrain over and over again.  The dream switched gears after that to things that I can only capture wisps of.  For instance, I’m pretty sure that at one point I was being led into battle by some famous actor.

I need to find a better dream job.