Dweezil?

Let's all take a moment to consider the Internet. Before the Internet, you spent time with loved ones and friends, probably enhancing your life in the process. With the Internet, you throw all of that out the window so you can read what some dork thought about last night's Top Chef on Twitter (spoiler: LAAAAAAAAAME!!!! PLEASE RT!!!!!! #kanyewasframed).

Of course, that's not all there is on the Internet. There's also a plethora of strange and exciting websites (such as this one, minus the exciting part) where people talk about their lives and some of the interesting things they've figured out, like being able to control their dreams. That act is called lucid dreaming, and I am really intrigued with it. Laura thinks the reason I'm intrigued is because it'd allow me to fly around the world in my underwear. I maintain this is incorrect; in my dreams, I'd much rather be a wolfman who terrorizes the inhabitants of a sleepy town in Manitoba. I actually don't know why I'm so interested in being able to direct my dreams, except that it's a large block of time where I'm not really doing that much. I might as well spice it up.

One of the first steps to lucid dreaming is being able to vividly recall your dreams, and so I've started writing down my dreams as soon as I wake up. Most mornings, this works pretty well. Other mornings, like today when I all I wrote was "Larry + Darrell = Dweezil + Larry" (seriously... here's proof), it leads to great confusion. Still, I continue to document them because I am devoted to seeing this crazy experiment through to the end.

The next step, after writing up your dreams, is to analyze what you've written and try to find common elements. The idea is that, once you pick up on these subtle hints that tell you that you're dreaming, you can then spot them in a dream. Once you know you're dreaming, you can start to experiment with things, like trying fly around the world in your underwear or becoming a wolfman and terrorizing the inhabitants of a sleepy town in Manitoba.

As I write these dreams up, I'm watching for these common elements and for a while there, I thought I found something. In one of the first dreams I wrote about, I moved into a retirement home where Chevy Chase was my next door neighbor. When I woke up the next morning, I was a little giddy. Maybe Chevy Chase was one of those signs that I was dreaming, and he'd start popping up all over the place in my dreams! Not only is Chevy Chase pretty memorable as a signal, but maybe it also meant I'd be getting some dreamtime Vacation/Fletch-era Chevy comedy. I am definitely cool with that, although I'd be considerably less excited about Cops and Robbersons-era Chevy.

Unfortunately, in the several days since I made my Chevy Chase breakthrough, I've yet to have another Chevy sighting or really discover any commonality amongst these dreams. The only thing I've got going right now, and it's a huuuuge stretch, is that I seem to occasionally have people with odd first names (Chevy, Dweezil) as supporting players in my dreams. If I encounter Yahoo Serious tonight while asleep, the trend is confirmed. Then, I must seriously question why I'm dreaming about Yahoo Serious and Dweezil Zappa.