Fantasies and boredom

A good friend once told me that when she got really bored, she started fantasizing about torture: elaborate scenes in which she was the perpetrator. Needless to say, it's not a fantasy she plays out in real life.

But it made me wonder about those strange dreams that move into your head when you're bored. I sit through two-hour lectures. My attention span can be so short I've sometimes wondered if I missed out on an ADD diagnosis I really deserved. I fantasize about all kinds of things: sometimes violent, raw or just plain strange.

And what about the intersection of fantasies and dreams? Last night I dreamed I was pregnant (a dream I've never had before) with twin girls. The strange part is, I remember people asking me over and over who the father was, and I simply could not remember. I was 21, there was no father, and everyone seemed extremely happy for me. I only felt anxious once, and that was when I looked down at my pregnant self and realized I had X-ray vision, and could see through my skin to the babies inside. And somehow, Howard Stern was involved.

But it was a happy dream.

Which makes me wonder. The strange part about dreaming isn't what happens (although it's usually creepy) but how you feel about it when it's ocurring. Another friend - a really, really heterosexual one - told me this in high school. "So the other night I had a dream where you and I hooked up," she said, as we got into her car. "And the entire time it felt so strange and awkward!" Your dream was strange and awkward? I thought. What about this conversation? She seemed relieved - obviously, if even her dream self didn't like girls, she was out of the so-called lesbian woods - but I don't know.

Is dreaming like drinking? Does it lower your inhibitions and turn you into a stranger? What about nightmares? I once read that dreams are the mind's way of getting rid of excess energy. Perhaps high-intensity dreamers are just people with loads of excess mental energy - that makes sense, if boredom leads to daydreams. When I'm tired I almost never dream, but when I'm on vacation I dream so intensely that I wake up feeling I didn't sleep at all but actually, briefly, lived another life.