I had a dream recently where I was on my way to a clothing store to exchange some things that didn't fit. When I got to the store, I looked at the proprietress, opened my mouth to speak, and realized that I was about to speak to her in Chinese. (The fully formed sentence Wo keyi huan zhe jian yifu ma? [May I exchange these clothes?] was right on the tip of my tongue.)

I knew she'd never understand me, but for some reason I couldn't seem to get the Chinese words out of my head in order to offer a coherent sentence. So I just stood there for a minute, with my mouth hanging open, while she looked at me quizzically.

Finally the right words came:

Sumimasen, chugokugo de hanashitakattan desu kedo, chugokugo wo hanasu to wakaranai kana to kidzukimashita. Kono fuku wo kaeraremasen ka? (I'm sorry, I wanted to speak Chinese, but I realized that if I did you probably wouldn't understand. Can I exchange these clothes?)

Clearly, it was a Japanese dream - not a Chinese dream.

Silly me.

I've noticed an interesting trend in my dreams of late and also realized that this development stretches back at least a year.

As a child, I used to have very intense nightmares. (I was also subject to sleepwalking, sleep-talking, and night terrors, but that's a whole 'nother issue.) They were typically themed, often recurrent, and sometimes even serial. When I was about ten years old, I had a serial nightmare that spanned a week and involved a very intricate--and quite terrifying--plot line.

These nightmares have continued all my life, with a revolving set of themes--whatever happened to be on my mind, I suppose--taking over at different points in my life. Needless to say, ghosts and monsters always formed a crucial mainstay of my nocturnal struggles.

However, a dream I had the other morning made me aware of something really strange: I don't exactly have nightmares anymore. I still have intense dreams that are filled with disturbing imagery and content, but I am not afraid during them. And I usually figure out a way to avoid bodily harm in the dream, either through some ingenuous plan or simply through a kind of unstoppable will power.

For example, I recently thwarted the attempts of flesh-eating monsters to capture me with a brilliantly constructed automatic dummy. I first used the machine to get away from them--and to make them aware that I was inside of it--and then snuck out at a propitious moment to watch them chase after it in blind fervor.

Other dreams from the past year have been similar. I sometimes wake up tense, but never from fear. I suppose this says something about my mental state, or my self-confidence, or something like that. And that's good, I guess.

But it makes for way more pleasant sleeping, regardless. And that's great.

I had incredibly strange and amusing dreams last night - the highlights of which are the following:

I dreamed that the T.J. Clark article assigned for the section on social history in Methodology was replaced, at the last minute, by a random scene from the film Mobsters. In the process of going to screening room to view and discuss the scene in question, I noticed a poster for a documentary on migratory birds. The tagline read: "See the adorable ducklings; see the retarded geese in a row."

I woke up laughing.