When I wake up I’m usually lucky enough to remember at least some of the scenes from my nightly, epic, random, morphing dreams. And every now and then it turns out that I have a dream that is influenced by something I had been thinking about the day before. What’s interesting to me is that whenever I trace a dream segment to something I had thought about the previous day, it’s always the case that I thought about whatever it was in a certain way. Specifically, it wasn’t a main concern that I was giving lots of time to. Instead, I thought about it vaguely and briefly, in the back of my mind. It’s as if anything I think about in this manner becomes potential dream material. What’s more, I can’t think about things this way if I make an effort to. It’s nothing I have control over, though I’m sure some monks have got this shit down. For me, it just happens.