Submitted For Your Approval

L. and I have just started watching Lost, so we're in a kind of "hidden eerieness" frame of mind at the moment.

Ignoreable offtopic digressions:

• There should be a verb that distinguishes watching episodic TV week by week on the network or cable channel that airs it versus watching it ad hoc on DVD. And, probably, for as long as there's this distinction, between network watching and TiVo watching. We are, for the record, DVD watching.
• How long before the Style Manual is updated to indicate that titles of works, just as they are to be italicized in regular (non-hyper) texts, must be linked when they appear in hypertexts? And what will the guidelines be for what is to be at the end of those links? Will placement in the Style Manual be something that, say, Amazon can buy for books, or IMdb can buy for movies and TV shows?
• Discuss
• Do not discuss anything about Lost, because we do not want any of it spoiled for us.

With that in mind, I present this: the other day I woke up with the flavor of an odd dream still lingering in my brain, in which I was married to somebody else (a real person, somebody, in real life, that I used to work for), and sort of came into the dream in medias res thinking, "Crap. This must have seemed like an okay idea at the time, I mean I like this person well enough, but I was really happy being married to L. What the hell happened?" Later I either woke up or dreamt that I woke up and discovered it was all okay. Later that day I off-the-cuff emailed L. about it and...wait for it...she had had the same dream--same situation (in her dream she had married the (real-life) son of some friends of her parents), same sense of the dream (the sort of wtf? at suddenly being married to somebody else).

We were trying to figure out what might have triggered this little synchrony--the only thing we could come up with was that we'd gotten news the night before that some very very long time couple friends of ours were getting married (unceremoniously taking the mantle from Sam and Red as Partners Who Held Out Longest Before Succumbing to the Heterosexist Matrix, Who Are Also Friends of Ours) (It's a really nice trophy, too, burnished metal mounted on an oak base with gothic lettered engraving, I really hate to have to fly to Wales and relieve them of it). But that was as good as we could do, and it wasn't an entirely satisfying explanation.

People spend about five minutes with us before remarking that we sound like the same person. I guess this happens when you start evolving in tandem with somebody else, and from my perspective (and L.'s, I assume) it's that our brains (figuratively!) run in the same channel. There'll be some sort of external stimulus, such as a third party saying something, and as if it were the setup to a joke we both know, we'll burst out with the same response. So this dream thing, if the dream was the punchline, got me to wondering what the setup was.

You don't remember words, or images, or smells, or sounds. What you hold in your brain are chemical patterns and signals, and other parts of the brain interpret those things as words and images and sounds each time you remember something. In the same way, dreams aren't made up of images or sounds, they are made up of chemical signals wandering around--my own pet theory is that your brain is doing a nightly RAM dump, that 'tiredness' is actually your available RAM filling up, and dreaming is your conscious interpretation of the brain's batch job that moves the day's input either to the hard disk or to the trash bin. The images and sounds, in any case, are just a translation.

If all of those things are true, it's not even that surprising that L. and I would occasionally have run-ins in the sublimial realm. It wouldn't be surprising that we'd interpret a particular stimulus of the day with a similar response. It sure was creepy, though.