Innovative phone dial pad

Another recent dream that I wanted to share today was also the most bizarre. Of course, it also woke me up. 

I was attempting to dial up using an old rotary phone. As I dialed one number and the wheel returned to its original position, I couldn’t remember which number was next (again, it was just a dream), so after some frustrating attempts I was presented with another phone, not the touch-tone phone device we all know, but a bizarre contraption that only had three keys.

Perhaps, I just couldn’t remember what a touch-tone dial looked like, which might say a lot about the quality of my old memory… As a result I seemed to have no choice but to create a new one with only three keys to make things simple. 

This said, during my dream I still couldn’t comprehend how it worked, but suffice to say that it looked like the rendition pictured here. Now, go figure (if you can)!

Dreams: Riding bikes in reverse

When it comes to my dreams, my ability to remember them varies a whole lot. The ones that wake me up brutally and for good, I vividly remember them. The others that I kind of recall in a figment of consciousness, if I live them almost consciously when they occur, I can guarantee you that, the next morning, I still remember having had some dreams, but I’m woefully unable to tell what they were about! 

This is pretty much the essence of dream memory, and these are the few conclusions I’ve drawn about them: 

• Abrupt awakenings preserve dreams, 
• Smooth transitions erase them, 
• Awareness doesn’t guarantee recall, 
• REM is vivid but poorly stored. 

So just to illustrate my above stream of consciousness, here is a recent dream of mine. I believe it was inspired by what I see all along the winter season on the slopes with skiers going backwards.

I just saw in my dream three cyclists deciding to ride backwards, against traffic on a steep road, something I would never attempt in my wildest dream (I guess I’m wrong on that account!) I thought to myself “This is crazy, this practice should be forbidden!” I just hope you won’t disagree with me, as it will largely compensate me for waking up…

Aging: running out of time and dreams (Part Two)

To pursue on that subject of ambition vs. curiosity, let me add that dreams may shrink in size but they grow in intensity. Curiosity is the antidote to the fear of limited time because it doesn’t require a future — only a present. At that point, it’s time to stop asking dreams to justify themselves. 

As we age, we demand that dreams be practical, meaningful, efficient, worth the time and the energy, but dreams don’t survive interrogation, they just survive permission. True, dreams don’t need guarantees; they need oxygen. And oxygen comes from allowing ourselves to explore without demanding a return on investment.

We must also use mortality as a focusing lens, not a threat. This is perhaps counterintuitive but extremely powerful. When time feels infinite, dreams scatter, but when time feels finite, dreams sharpen. To this, we could add that the awareness of limited time can either suffocate dreams or distill them. The trick is to let mortality clarify what truly matters instead of letting it intimidate us. 

Let’s also not forget that the biggest barrier to dreaming later in life is the belief that dreams must be large. This said the mind blooms when the dream is actionable, immediate, sized to fit our time-frame and emotionally resonant. A dream that begins today is a dream that survives. There’s no question that getting older is tricky because time suddenly feels like a narrow corridor instead of a wide, open plain. 

When we sense that the future is limited or uncertain, dreams become timid — they hesitate, they hide, or they never germinate at all. Still, dreams don’t disappear because we age; they disappear because we start demanding guarantees. We ask them to justify themselves, to prove they’re worth the time, the energy, the risk. And under that pressure, they retreat. 

So let’s remember that the way forward is to make dreaming lighter again. To shift from lifelong ambitions to seasonal ones. To replace ambition with curiosity. To let mortality sharpen our focus instead of dulling our imagination. Dreams bloom when they’re small enough to begin today, gentle enough not to intimidate us, and meaningful enough to stir something inside us. 

Time may be limited, but imagination isn’t — and the mind remains fertile as long as we give it permission to wander, explore, and play.

Aging: running out of time and dreams (Part One)

Getting older isn't for the faint at heart as we are under a pretty strong impression that the time ahead of us is more than limited and uncertain. So it’s pretty obvious that when we feel boxed-in in such a way, whatever dream we might generate gets scared, runs away in a hurry or doesn't even bother to germinate into our minds... 

The interrogation we’re left with is how can they pop-up into our mind and bloom no matter the time constraints we’re imposing on them? This is one of those questions that sits right at the intersection of psychology, philosophy, and the essence of aging.

When time feels finite, our mind becomes conservative. Dreams don’t die because we’re older; they die because the mind becomes like a risk‑averse accountant, constantly calculating “Is it worth it?” instead of "Let's try it" or “What if?” For instance, “Should I even buy a ski season pass this year? There's no absolute guarantee that I will make it through the winter, right?” The thought captures the emotional truth of that shift.

What we can add — and what will make our reflection more powerful, is a clearer articulation of how dreams still can emerge and thrive even under the pressure of limited time. What I’m convinced of, is about the psychological contraction of aging: that boxed‑in feeling is real. Then there’s the fragility of dreams under time pressure and the existential tension of still wanting to bloom while fearing the clock. One solution to that quandary is to shift from “lifelong dreams” to “seasonal dreams”. 

When we’re young, dreams are grand arcs, but as we grow older, dreams need to become seasonal in order to fit into our timeframe and thrive. They turn into smaller, sharper and more immediate inspirations. All dreams don’t need 20 years. They can be a 6‑month project, a 3‑week exploration or just a 1‑day experiment. Our minds need a proper scale in order to bloom!  

There’s another way to improve that situation by replacing ambition with curiosity. Ambition is heavy, curiosity is much lighter. If ambition asks, “Will this succeed?” curiosity asks, “What happens if I try?” We’ll continue that discussion tomorrow and explore that subtle change from ambition to curiosity, so if you're curious, please return!

Finding meaning in my own dreams?

French Prime Minister pumping gas...

Last week, I experienced a series of what I would say were senseless dreams. One of them was my meeting at some gas pump (???) with Francois Bayrou, the current French Prime Minister whom I mistook for his boss, by saying “Good afternoon Mr. President!” and I started to cheer him up in my own ways as he’s currently badly politically embattled. 

This prompted me to wonder, after all the years following Carl Jung’s theories on the subject, what was modern psychology and psychotherapy saying about the deep meaning of dreams? Evidently, I had not followed much of the aggregated knowledge on the subject since Jung’s time as the landscape of dream interpretation has evolved dramatically, but still the fascination with dreams as windows into the psyche remains with us. 

In his time, Jung saw dreams as expressions of the collective unconscious and symbolic messages from deep within, often carrying archetypal meaning. Today, many psychologists still value dreams for their symbolic and emotional content, but they’re more cautious about making interpretations of them as their focus has shifted toward personal meaning instead of fixed symbolism. 

In addition there have been biological theories suggesting that dreams are the brain’s attempt to make sense of random neural activity during rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep. Yet, even this “randomness” often reflects emotional themes like fear, longing, or unresolved conflict, which can give dreams some psychological relevance. 

More recently the Finnish neuroscientist Antti Revonsuo proposed that dreams evolved to simulate threats, helping us rehearse responses to danger. Others see dreams as a form of emotional regulation, helping us process grief, trauma, or stress. For example, PTSD nightmares often reflect unprocessed trauma and are sometimes used as therapeutic targets in EMDR therapy, that stands for “Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing”, a psychotherapy technique designed to help individuals process and recover from traumatic experiences and other distressing life events. 

While dream analysis is rare in today’s therapy, some psycho-dynamic and trauma-informed approaches still explore dreams, especially when clients bring them in. When this happens, the client’s own interpretation is prioritized over the therapist’s reading. Dreams are seen as metaphors for inner states, not puzzles to be solved. 

So, rather than offering universal truths, modern psychology treats dreams as personal narratives shaped by memory, emotion, and subconscious processing. They’re also viewed as symbolic reflections of current psychological states, like grief, anxiety, desire, or transformation. During change or crisis, dreams can also be seen like creative expressions of the mind’s attempt to make sense of things. 

In other worlds, while dreams still might be meaningful, their meaning is us to discover and not imposed from the outside. As for me, I take them as the result of my mind conducting some serious house-cleaning inside my confused and overstuffed gray matter!

A phone call to dream for?

These days my dreams have been rather tame, not to say boring. They’re definitely less stressful and I credit this to my meditation practice. This said, I have an original one to share with you. 

A few nights ago, I was in the middle of a dream in which I heard a persistent buzz, so after a significant while, I realized it might have been my phone buzzing. 

So, in my dream, I pulled my device out of my pocket and began to swipe its screen, swiped it and swiped it again and kept on swiping it to no avail until my vain efforts woke me up and I realized that the buzzing came out of my wife “buzzing” respiration (some less generous folks would call this “light snoring”!) 

So that this was the extent of my high-tech dream that realized itself into hard reality! It’s true that everyone wonders why it can be so hard to swipe a smartphone when taking a phone call? No one can deny that taking a phone call can be so difficult at times. It can be caused by touchscreen sensitivity, but most likely by slightly wet or cold fingers, perhaps a film to protect the screen, and some screens maybe more sensitive than others. 

The way we operate the swiping motion also requires precise swipe direction and speed, and may not register if not done right. Also Android and Apple handle calls answering slightly differently (Androids can be more finicky than iPhone’s) and, additionally, the specific implementation can vary between phone manufacturers and OS versions. 

There’s additionally the instance when we’re distracted or in a hurry that might make it harder to perform a correct swipe. Make sure the screen is clean and dry, swipe firmly and deliberately in the correct direction, don’t hesitate or don’t rush! If available, using a bluetooth headset can make answering calls much easier. 

By following these tips, we all could significantly improve our success rate when taking calls on smartphones or resolve complicated dreams like mine...

A Trumpian dream?

During his 2024 campaign, Donald Trump promised to lower grocery prices. He emphasized this frequently, saying that he’d bring down the cost of groceries like eggs, bacon, and apples, which had increased a lot under Biden. 

However, despite his promises, grocery prices have continued to rise and eggs are still creeping up with no end in sight! This is probably what prompted my dream last night when I saw Trump addressing a large group of hens inside a chicken coop and asking them to triple their daily egg production in order to bring enough supply of their protein-rich products, so it could drop down their stratospheric cost. 

As his head was, as usual, leaning over his lectern in his soft loving side, in front of already good productive hens, I was expecting him to be nice and to charm all of the birds assembled in front of him into laying many more eggs. 

 

Instead he said: “If you can’t triple your daily production I’ll have no choice but asking Vance (his VP) and Kennedy (his Health guy) to come and twist all your necks, and by doing so, teach you a memorable lesson in capitalistic productivity!” 

As I woke up, it was no longer a dream, but a scary nightmare with the same old terror-inducing, threatening tactics!

Dreams and meditation

People often wonder if meditation has an effect on the way they dream, their type and their quality, and it would appear that meditation can indeed influence them. After meditating everyday for almost five years, it has had an effect on my dreams, but before I get into this, let’s look at what general research says on the subject: 

Regular meditation is said to enhance awareness, making it easier to remember dreams upon waking. Dreams are also said to be more vivid and lucid, filled with details as the mind is more present and aware. They’re also said to occur more frequently and there’s the case of meditation increasing the likelihood of lucid dreaming, where we become aware we're dreaming and can sometimes control the dream narrative. 

I’d say that this latter aspect is something I have briefly experienced recently, but the preceding stuff hasn’t been part of what I can recall. However, what I’ve observed in the last two months is a much calmer dream pattern, devoid of stress, whereas, since I’ve been retired, most of my dreams were highly stressful, complicated and, at times, frightening, not to mention that they’d wake me up all the time.

Now I sleep much better and wake up fresh and ready to go. I haven’t had specific changes in my life to justify that drastic change and the only reason I can find is a higher mindfulness and better meditation. It’s obvious that individual experiences do vary and while meditation can positively influence dream patterns, there is no guarantee it will do the same for everyone…

Big plane, good beds…

A few nights ago, I had that fascinating dream involving myself inside an airplane where I had just discovered a section of the aircraft outfitted with real, comfortable beds. Since it appeared to be a long-haul flight, I was lucky enough to find an empty bed and slipped inside it, and instantly fell asleep.

That dream seemed to have lasted a long time into my night and eventually I woke up (still in my dream) because I felt an urge to go pee, but was afraid to abandon the bed as I had to reach the toilets and subsequently potentially lose that precious resting spot. 

So I held up the best I could and that dream kept on lasting and covered, it seemed to me, the entire night. During the two subsequent nights, I used the image and feelings I remembered from that dream (except the urge to pee) and I felt it markedly improved my general quality of sleep. 

I might be on something good, who knows?

Why do I have bad dreams?

It’s my personal opinion that my life is quite good, but my dreams tell me a different story. They’re generally bad, stressful, wake me up and to often leave me quite depressed. What gives? Well, we all know that the question of whether dreams have meaning has been pondered by philosophers and scientists for centuries, and there's no one definitive answer.

So, I take it that dreams are a random form of mental housekeeping that follow neither rhyme or reason. In other words, a wide variety of disassociated and disjointed components are thrown up in the air and fall wherever they feel like, often making me feel pretty bad for no good reason, and unfortunately wake me up several times in the early hours which I don’t appreciate at all. 

Add to that their depressing tone and negative message that force me to fully wake up and tell my brain that it is pure BS and I should ignore it, as I order the rest of my body systems to return to sleep. And that is, at this point, when I often get no satisfaction. I can’t get back to sleep. I’m not happy, but this is no serious matter, it’s just become a dreaded routine that I will survive well!

What if the moon fell on us?

Unable to fall back to sleep a few nights ago, while a timid moonshine ray was filtering into the bedroom, I was wondering if it might be at all possible that the moon – one day – change its mind and either looses it orbit elevation and crash back on to earth.

I thought about it, because I knew it could potentially happen to artificial satellites. This certainly does, because of some amount of atmospheric drag that could gradually slow down the satellite and cause its orbit to change. 

As the satellite loses altitude, it may eventually reenter Earth's atmosphere and burn up or crash. That could also be caused from solar radiation pressure on large, lightweight satellites that can cause them to gradually drift away from their intended orbit. 

Mechanical or technical failures can also create similar problems and so can collisions with space debris. As a result, satellite operators have to perform regular orbit maintenance maneuvers, using onboard propulsion systems, to counteract any drag or drift. 

So when I researched the likelihood of the moon crashing on us, I learned that our natural satellite is relatively stable and does not typically change drastically. It is thus highly unlikely that our moon will crash on us, or conversely, escape its gravitational attraction without external influences. 

This might however, happen in the very long term, under gravitational influence of other celestial bodies, tidal forces from the Sun, or a gradual transfer of angular momentum from the Earth to the Moon due to tidal interactions. 

We’re talking there about very slow changes in the moon's orbit, I’m told, as we are talking about millions to billions of years. So, I won’t worry too much for me, my kids and their posterity, and that probably is why I quickly returned to sleep after that almost lunatic thought (pun intended) crossed my mind!

A moose inside my office

Last night another special dream woke me up as it made a strong impression on me, and that’s probably why I remembered it so vividly. 

Somehow, a large moose had venture inside what could have been our Park City home. Out of precaution, I had succeeded in channeling the animal inside my relatively small office space and carefully closed the door. 

Then I had gone out and asked passers-by a stupid question like: “Have you had any experience with a moose inside your office and how did you manage to get it out of that room without getting trampled to death?” 

As you can imagine, strangers like these weren’t much help in guiding me and my only issue left was to wake up. Damn wandering moose!

JP Chatellard comes to visit…

This past week I dreamed that my old and now deceased friend, Jean-Pierre “JP” Chatellard, had come to visit me. 

The picture was so vivid, real and compelling that I was utterly confused. Even in my dream I remembered that JP had passed away in 2020, but I was so mixed-up and embarrassed that I begun to doubt that he had indeed left us, and wondered if his disappearance was just me being totally wrong. 

I couldn’t address that I knew he had passed away, as he was so lively, smiling and engaging during that encounter that I had to change my belief, thinking he was there for real. 

That disturbing apparition was enough to wake me up. 

What triggered that special dream? Perhaps the fact that Mikaela Shiffrin was about to shatter Ingemar Stenmark’s Ski World Cup victory record, and that JP was working with the Swedish champion in those days, but never had a dream ever appeared to me as so true and emotional as this one.

My dreams and my reality

We all have dreams and we all have a reality to contend with. As a result, there’s often a disconnect between our dreams and our reality, and often the former runs a step ahead in overall quality over the latter. I believe that happens with most people, but what do I know? 

This said, I must confess that for as long as I can remember and that runs at least a couple of decades (the double couple of decades before are, I must admit, is a total blur as my overstuffed memory can handle so much), a tiny number of my dreams have been pleasant, all the rest that made some impression on me were depressing, scary and amounted always to a lot of unpleasant work. 

Something most reasonable people would call nightmares. Perhaps is it due to the fact that bad dreams woke me up, while good ones let me sleep like a baby? That’s a fair possibility. 

At any rate, that observation leads me to say that if to most people their dreams are better than their reality, my dreaming condition runs exactly the opposite: My daily reality is way better than my dreams, I love it and I sincerely hope this status will remain the same for as long as I live. 

That, we’ll see!

“You can be anything you want to be…”

Is this true that we can be anything we want? Partially, perhaps, but there’s no guarantee. 

Each human endeavors calls fro specific talents, skills and affinities that are not necessarily given to everyone, so there might be some material and intellectual limitations to the type of individual one would like to become in the course of their lifetime.

The affirmation might be true in many cases, but certainly not universally. Yet, it’s one of these popular myths that populate the American folk culture. 

You wanna be a fireman, an astronaut or an explorer? That’s probably feasible. Now is the Pope, Pablo Picasso or the Dalai-Lama on one’s crystal bowl? 

Any of these choices might get trickier, and along the same lines we could cover other careers or destinies that are so narrow that their probability might get much slimmer. 

Just like the fabled American Dream, becoming whatever we dream we want to be comes with a few caveats. Enough for me to just dreaming that I’m the real me and that’s already plenty!

Surprising self-envy…

My nights are no longer the uninterrupted river of sleep they used to be. More often than not, my dreams, regardless of their quality or fear-inducing intensity, wake me up and getting back to sleep can be a long process. 

 Thankfully, when this happens, the following night is a far better one, so I’m not complaining about chronic sleeplessness yet. 

This said, as I couldn’t sleep the other night, I decided to go into an exploration of my past by laying out the most intense moments of my life one after the other, and after a while, and before I was providentially about to go back to sleep, I got thinking: “This is a surprisingly good life. I envy that guy!” 

That startling revelation coming from my own thinking gave me a strong reason to stay awake for another little while!

 

My dreams vs. my reality

I'm lucky to have plenty of dreams, and most of the time I remember them or at least they make sure I remember them well. Overall, I can only lament about their quality. In fact most of them are so bad that they keep on waking me up, night after night (the main reason I remember them). 

I would say that considering my lighter sleep, that I assume is attributable to age, my nightmares or just bad dreams keep on rolling it, almost to the point that I have mixed feelings of apprehension when I go to bed. 

Without getting into the minute details of each one of my dreams, they’re all about “old business” and seem to settle scores that could have happened during my active, professional life, even though, too me at least, they’re totally unjustified, unwarranted and undeserved. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that when these mental, nasty intruders kick me out of my sleep, I wake up to my reality and to my relief, it’s good. Always good and in fact my reality has never been so good as it is now. So, here I am, having terrible dreams that inevitably bring me awake to a very good reality. 

How many would envy this situation and would be ready to switch their dreams and reality combo with mine?

On-line order nightmare

I woke up at 4:00 am and since that was too early to get up, I did my daily meditation, then at around 5:00 am, I decided to sleep a little more. 

I opened my front door and first saw what looked like a dozen pair of skis, in boxes, that have just been delivered to my house, then I glanced farther and to my shock, I saw dozens of surfboards and a bunch of boats, all in their delivery packaging, piled up in the driveway and on my front yard. 

At first, I felt that might day was ruined. “Where would I put all that stuff?” Briefly, I remembered that I got the same delivery the day before, but UPS must have removed it. 

Then, I thought about the cost of that online order that was one million or more and that would have to pay for it. I felt totally helpless. 

That’s when I woke up. I’m glad I did. If I had not, I would have died from a heart attack!

The Dream I never had

Like anyone my age, I had my share of dreams, some wonderful, some mediocre, some downright awful (we call that nightmare), in all kind of settings, situations or time period. 

Many that I can recall came up to me because of excessive stress during my working life and lingered for a very long time. It’s only now that they are much milder and far less anguishing. 

Yet, in all these years and as far as I can remember, I never dreamed of being on a pair of skis, actually skiing and having the fun of my life! This, in spite of the fact that skiing has always been my number one pursuit and passion in life. 

Sure, I have had dreams about professional in ski business, at the ski shows, but the life of me, I never dreamed of having and enjoying a pleasurable ski run. 

Of course, I wonder why that situation is the way it is. It might be that my ski reality is so good and so perfect that there is absolutely no need for me to get it spoiled by a less-than-perfect dream!

What’s wrong with my nightmares?

Like many people around my age, I dislike the deteriorating quality of my sleep and miss the long, uninterrupted nights of rest that I always found too short when I was younger. 

For almost a decade now, my bed time is not as sound as it used to be and is generally affected by a series of dreams that wake me up fully or partially. In the past I hardly ever noticed or remembered any dream. 

What bothers me is that the vast majority of my dreams are nightmares and are totally unlike my life, my current concerns, or situations I currently encounter, which all are for the overwhelming part are totally positive.

Why is that? Perhaps Mother Nature wants me to remember that life isn’t that great after all for most people, all the time. I thought listening to the (bad) news that I hear all day long would suffice for that necessary dose of dark reality, but that is seemingly not the case. 

Well, I guess that my good dreams (I suspect I still have some) get filtered out and are so mild, weak or soft that they won’t wake me up. If that’s not the case, I might have to seek some professional help to try to understand what these bad dream come from and what they mean. 

By the way, how is your daily dream’s menu? Are they as harassing as mine?