BRB, I'm still dreaming up a title.

Hello, why are you daydreaming? 

Our minds are usually adrift, dimly aware as to where or, even, why we're fantasizing. Maybe the round table talk was getting a trifle tired over dinner, or, perhaps, we don't really care about that friend who can't stop yakking about his dismal relationship. We daydream because we're restless, in other words, regardless of what we dredge out from the mud-pit that is our imagination. "Can I leave?" "I need to scratch my balls, would he take that the wrong way?" "Can he tell that I'm not listening? OK. Make eye contact." 

Then, what about the unsolicited hours when we're asleep? Unlike with spacing out, dreaming is night-time activity. And dreams are cathartic. They're unique to individual experiences, and they could also be puerile. Between fantasizing about munching somebody till their eyeballs roll back into their sockets and overplaying an entire murder sequence on your boss, your thoughts can only be so ludicrous in dreams it makes daydreaming kiddie fodder. 

I suffered the latter last night after someone turned the A/C off and, groggily maneuvered my way to the loo to take a call time from sleep, resumed afterward unhappy, grouchy, and depressed. Because it happens every time someone disrupts the cyclical motion of rest, I'm starting to recognize a pattern. The mis-en-scene was a rustic hotel that elicited a Stephen King thriller, the characters were blurry caricatures of people who could cast an episode of Lost, and the plot was a thumping march toward my own imminent doom, eventually. In those couple of hours wherein I played victim/hero/protagonist in my own drama, the fear was so gripping I woke up dislocated (psychically). 

But why do we dream? Theoretically, dreaming has nary of a function to the everyday life. It barely makes anyone smarter or relaxed as some scientists have claimed. I'm my own testimonial of its misbelief because even the most violent of naps have not honored my GPA nor increased my serotonin levels. Perhaps its most credible explanation lies in the still processing of memories, where our brains suss out important information and interpret them accordingly to whichever feeling was consciously dominant before we hit the rack. So, for instance, if you've just suffered a break up, you are going to be dreaming up a sad tale; or, if you've just taken an important paper, you might dream about failing- because you're anxious. "Don't sleep unhappy", as our mothers used to nag.

However, all this makes little sense because we're theorizing something that is just as functional as to reprieve from a busier daytime (or social media). Dreaming is actually less symbolic, contrary to Freud who romanticized that we are all poets in the night. It is neither an auspice that tells you which lottery digit to buy nor a warning that shapes our future, than merely memory processing like a videotape while we rest. It plays back memorable events relentlessly and sometimes distorts the tape. That that basically delineates the entire Sinister 2 movie, featuring Ehtan Hawke and a bunch of super8 home reels on August 20, dreams too, are terrifying to anticipate.

What is more disconcerting about dreaming is the type that overruns its effect into the day. Like mine, your dreams could spoil the mood. If you were dreaming of something hellish, you would not be able to shrug off its aftermath as if it were just conversations at the water cooler. Bad dreams weigh down the merriest of men, in brief. I couldn't even sit proper and write this until I hit the gym, because bad dreams embargo your daytime cheerio.

The only logical retort as to why we dream and interpret them is because we don't leave questions unanswered. If we do, it makes us feel uncomfortable, like a rash whose itch won't stop until you got to the rub of the problem. The natural curiosity of Man to question, argue, and make for a case in point about almost anything is evidenced in the emphasis we place on matter as infinitesimal as a dream. (Representative: The Chicken or the Egg dilemma.) But before I derail into the intellectual hodgepodge of dream psychology, my stake is a simple one: Don't be that asshole that analyses everything. 

Born in a typical Chinese family wherein traditions eclipse common sense, I spent most of my growing up years swathed in superstitions. That they were "life-altering", a dream was supposed to crack a hole in the universe by predicting the next Big Sweep, leaping ahead the rest who but all want to get rich quick. If there were any clues leading to numbers, I was the Reiki master, reporting number sequences to my parents. ("Go for the gold, you idiot!") And I indulged in it. I would forage for numbers sleepily lost and then watch them snake a queue at the lottery counter, hoping against hope that for once, dreams do come true. 

They never did. So don't be that asshole that squanders money on dreams too.