Dream v. Reality

Maybe Justin is right and my ghost really was a dream. But if so, what did it mean?

Too bad I didn't have the Post to help back then. But today, I found this helpful guidance:

Ask any professional with dream experience, and their message is clear: Ignore quick-fix dream "doctors" on TV and the Internet. Toss your conventional dream dictionaries to the curb -- they are too strict, too patrician.

And their meanings? Meaningless.

It's common sense, really. Many people dream about cats, but not all dream that cats are manifestations of one's mother, as Freud suggested.

"After all, a dream about a house must mean different things to a carpenter and an arsonist," says Karen Shanor, a clinical psychologist who runs a private practice in Northwest Washington.

Dreams should be worked rather than cut and dried into categories, Shanor, Delaney and others say. No book -- and no one -- can tell you what your dreams mean, since one's dreaming life can be understood only in the context of one's waking life.

Riiiight. I guess that's what Richard Linklater meant with that weird movie.