Of course this is a dream, Harry. But why on Earth should that mean it isn’t true?

-Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

If you’re reading this in the morning, good morning!

If you’re reading this in the afternoon, good morning!

If you’re reading this at night, I sincerely suggest that you put away the device and go to sleep. You’re really stretching your parent’s patience.

Speaking of sleep, today’s topic is DREAMING glitter emoji glitter emoji.

Do you ever lie in bed, just trying to fall asleep, and your brain is like “I DON’T THINK SO, HERE’S TWO HUNDRED SONG LYRICS TO THE TUNE OF THE LETTERS OF YOUR NAME AND A COUPLE OF LINGERING REGRETS, HOPE YOU LIKE THEM, *maniacal laughter*!”

And that’s just before the dreaming starts. Because once you’re asleep, your brain puts your thoughts into a blender, swallows it all in one gulp, and regurgitates it into your eyeballs.

Sometimes, it’s a bad brain smoothie (monsters chasing you, parents chasing you, yourself chasing you).

Sometimes, it’s a good brain smoothie (lying in bed watching TV all day; results may vary, but personally, I’m an introvert).

And sometimes, it’s a weird brain smoothie. Once, I had a dream that I was in math class. No ants came out of the walls, no teachers started growing extra heads and screaming about reptilian cyborgs, nobody suddenly became the Avatar and started metalbending the desks into the shape of unnaturally arrogant hippos, just math class. (Don’t judge that last dream, I like Avatar, ok? It’s a good show.)

Every so often, the brain smoothie is completely empty, leading to those rare occurrences where you think you just blinked and you realize 6 hours have passed while you were asleep, and you don’t even feel tired. Ever looked at a clock, blinked, and then suddenly your alarm is playing and the clock says “6:00” or “6:25” or “12:00” or whatever time you wake up? It’s kinda freaky, not gonna lie.

When the brain smoothie has been swallowed, you wake up, whether you want to or not. If the smoothie has been drained, or was almost empty to begin with, you end up falling asleep at 8:10 and waking up at 8:15. That’s what we call napping. It can happen when you want and/or when you don’t want, like when you’re taking a sightseeing tour on a double-decker-bus in London, or when you’re looking at real estate billboards, or… well, you get the gist. (Actually, the real estate thing might be an addition to the official “things to nap during” list, along with orchestral concerts and school reports.)

Movies and TV shows always show the heroes having some sort of dream that actually comes true the following day, in the same episode, and everything is handily wrapped up in 22 minutes with no loose ends except for that one villain who makes a declaration of revenge while staring ominously into the distance.

Well, if dreams really did come true in real life, then monsters would be as common as trees, gravity would/wouldn’t happen to several varying degrees, and almost everybody would disappear within 24 hours max, except for a few stragglers who have nothing better to do than sleep.

Let‘s transition to another type of dreaming: daydreaming.

When you daydream, your mind kind of goes on autopilot and straps you into the passenger’s seat. Daydreaming can go in two ways: the way where you step onto the brain train and leave the body station (often interpreted as just staring into space), and the way where you daydream while doing an action, leading to something interesting happening with that action, like drawing mythical hydra dragons on your math homework.

I… I mean, not my homework, because I don’t… I don’t draw on my math homework. Just… just  a… a hypothetical… hypothetical student who… who draws on their homework… not me, just a hypothetical student who’s name isn’t Patrick. And hypothetically, if this hypothetical student’s name was Patrick, then maybe I this hypothetical student (let’s call him Shmatrick) just gets bored sometimes and wants a way to vent his boredom into an artistic form, and maybe I Shmatrick can’t help it if the canvas is a worksheet on the distributive property!

(Not that Shmatrick is in any way related to me, Patrick, who is not Shmatrick.)

SO DREAMING! LET’S TALK ABOUT DREAMING! IGNORE ME SHMATRICK! LET’S TALK ABOUT DREAMING!

In short, dreaming is basically the brain smoothie you may or may not want, but you have to drink it all anyway, because if you don’t, you might end up napping on that bus. So says Patrick Shmatrick.