45 minutes before my morning alarm, I woke up from a dream smiling. At first the dream was like I was watching TV, the stars of the dream all unknown to me, and I was an observer, not a participant. It was a story of two thieves in the late 1800’s, and after escaping with stolen property, one was in tears because he had failed to do his part. The other was consoling him, when they were interrupted by a female pickpocket.
Comedy ensued as she stole items from them while the main protagonist stole them back in a display of slight of hands that would not have been possible were this not a dream. Then they were caught by an inventive farmer and his mechanical, human looking robot, and sent to a jail that was something more like a modern day rehab centre.
Here they all ended up in a scene that was right out of a movie they had all seen, one where a bus outside passes a window and one of them realized that this scene involved a shooter getting out of the bus and shooting up the place. So he warns the others that this is going to happen, just like in the movie, and all of them having seen the movie drop to the floor to save themselves… nothing happens, and one of them, a different protagonist than earlier but somehow the same person in my mind, scolds the person who warned them to drop to the floor, calling him an idiot for somehow thinking that they were in a movie. Others start laughing at the absurdity of this, and I’m laughing too as I wake up.
How does our brain entertain us in this way in our sleep? What kind of mental gymnastics musts our minds do in order to create comedy where we ourselves don’t know the punchline, or don’t see the elements of the dream that amuse us, coming before the funny moment occurs? How does my brain partition the joke creator from the joke appreciator such that comedy can occur?
This doesn’t just happen with comedy, how do we scare or surprise ourselves? How is it that our brains can convince us that dreams are real, and that we must somehow cope with the bizarre and unrealistic issues we face in them. How do we jump back into a dream after temporarily waking up?
I subscribe to the idea that we are made up of many parts. In simple form, part of us wants to work out, while part of us is lazy; part of us wants a second helping of dessert, part of us thinks we’ve had enough; part of us wants to sleep longer, while part of us knows it’s time to get up. Part of us creates the dream, and part of us is a participant in it. But even knowing this, how does part of us share a joke or funny scene in a dream, and the other part not see it coming?
