I've been dreaming an awful lot lately. For the last few years, the number and frequency of my dreams has increased, and they seem to be more vivid and colorful. The nature of the dreams seems to have changed, too. Most of them seem to be neutral or pleasant, and the frustration/anxiety dreams I used to get all the time seem way reduced in number. I was only rarely ever plagued by real nightmares, but I don't seem to be having them at all now.

I've tried to isolate the cause of this; could it just be a sign of age, do old farts have specific dream patterns, like Hemingway's Old Man? It seems appropriate to ask you guys that, you're a pretty geriatric crowd... Then again, maybe it's just because I am retired; I'm relieved from the stresses and strains of going to work and the necessity to get up at a specific time every day. I'm getting plenty of sleep now, turn in and get up when I want and I'm not wandering about in a condition of exhaustion all the time. I've also gotten back into the civilized custom of my ancestors of taking my siesta in the afternoons.

Then again, it's hard to tell because the change was so gradual; but it seems my new dream pattern started establishing itself before I retired, back when I started making my preliminary preparations to retire but before I actually made the commitment to do so. Around that time I quit smoking, too. I used to be a two pack a day man until two years ago, stopping that cold turkey must have affected my brain chemistry. That might be significant.

As you guys probably know, I never believed one could get profound psychological self-insights by studying one's own dreams. I've always felt dreams were a random phenomenon, some normal by-product of brain function, perhaps even some kind of maintenance activity, or even an evolutionarily determined training process used to prepare the psyche for future emergencies and unusual situations. So I am not going to be too receptive to Freudian explanations.

If this is indeed a real phenomenon, I'm convinced it is purely physiological. I know it has been proven dreams are necessary to healthy human
functioning, but it doesn't follow from that that the dream narratives themselves mean anything or have any significance. Like the man himself said, "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar".

One more thing, when I wake up in the morning from a dream, it seems the dream remains vivid in my memory for a much longer time. It keeps mulling around in my head, almost as if I could simply slip back into it at will even though I am wide awake and aware it is just a dream. Is this the "lucid dreaming" I've heard people talk about? I hate to look those things up on the net, there are more loonies in the psychology/New Age/Alternative Medicine scene (is there really a difference?) than on the political blogosphere. They are both a form of hypochondria.