nightdreams Dreams have always been important to me. When I was six or seven, there was a magical green man who would visit me in my dreams and give me advice. These dreams were always quite vivid and I took his advice seriously because I was still too young to think twice about it. (In fact, I still don't salt my food very often because of what he told me.) When I was 18, my friend, Alison, gave me a dream journal because she enjoyed hearing me recount my nightly escapades. I would record my entries while half asleep, so the writing would wander all over the page. Friends often asked to read my dream journal, so I just left it out in my room where they could peruse it as they pleased. Not surprisingly, people especially enjoyed dreams in which they had appeared, sometimes arguing with me about their behavior in them. And while all that was fun, it was from this journal that I became aware that my subconscious knows more about what is going on in my life than my waking self, and that there can be more to dreaming than just surreal entertainment. A dramatic example of this was a series of dreams I had about my boyfriend at the time. In one, I was approached by a geisha girl who said, "I have a riddle for you. What do you call it just before you get married?" "Engagement," I told her. At this, she laughed and laughed, cruelly, much to the puzzlement of my dreaming self. In another dream, my boyfriend had a tiny Japanese girl in his back pocket, like a doll or pet. When I mentioned this to him in real life, he just laughed and told me what a ridiculous image that was. Still, I had seen a split second of surprise on his face which told me there was more to the story than that. So the next time he took a shower at my place, I looked in his pants' pockets. There, in his wallet, I found a picture of a beautiful Japanese girl and a letter from her saying how much she looked forward to being with him again. When I confronted him, he admitted that they were engaged. Of course, the bulk of my dreams are not so easy to decipher, nor do I feel the need to, but I do enjoy keeping in touch with this creative aspect of myself. In dreams, I can be man or animal or inanimate object. In dreams, I can bend the laws of time and space; sometimes I even fly. Like a colorful garden in perpetual bloom, my dreaming self constantly produces playful mental imagery, no matter how dull and restrictive my waking life may be.