Night mares.

Had a bad dream that woke me up the morning of September 11. Not sure if it had anything to do with that anniversary.

One part, the fun part, had me leaving an office to go to the stadium to see the Giants play. It's not the first time I've had a vivid dream that conflated sports with work. In this dream the stadium was much smaller and cozier than any real football stadium, but the Giants were losing, just like in real life. I decided to go home, but first I had to cross the stadium attached to that one; it was like a three-ring circus, one stadium after another (not unlike the old Meadowlands, which had Giants Stadium, Brendan Byrne Arena, and the Meadowlands Racetrack, except these were attached). In that next field was a horse race, and it was horrible.

This was no round-the-track-once race; the horses had to go around and around hundreds of times, like Indy drivers, and of course it killed them. But they kept going. My exit required me to walk right across the track, where by now the running horses were reduced to mere skeletons with bits of flesh and gristle. Someone complained about the smell.

Well, that was a fun thought with which to wake up.

I'm glad I don't go to a psychic. "Skeletal horses? Oh my stars! Doom! It's DOOOOM!" Well, maybe not, but it couldn't be good.

What causes these things? What was in my mind that brought that particular stew of images together?

I think about the things that had been happening that week: football season kickoff, work stress, anniversary of 9/11, the birthday of a childhood friend who died. More: I was reading a war book, working on a mystery novel, checking a soccer book for children. Scenes from real life? I don't live in Death Valley, where we all know picturesque animal bones are tastefully laid out in the sand. Nor do I attend Hogwarts, where the skeletal Thestrals pull the wagons. And I haven't been to a Giants game in decades, and I've only gone to the horse track twice (Meadowlands once, Saratoga once).

But who knows? Dreams are so hyper-personal that we may not even know ourselves from what parts of our large experiences, many thoughts, and complex personalities our dreams are getting data. My wife has heard that the people in your dreams may be faces you saw only in passing who sparked no conscious memory. But wouldn't anyone who pops up in dreams have had to have been committed to long-term memory?

And why do we even dream anyway?

According to sleep guru Michael J. Breus, Ph.D., writing in Psychology Today, "While some scientists posit that dreaming has no direct function—but instead is a consequence of other biological processes that occur during sleep—many studying sleep and dreams believe dreaming serves a primary purpose."

He goes on to list six possible purposes:

1. memory processing (consolidation of learning and short-term memory to long-term memory storage)
2. extension of waking consciousness, reflecting the experiences of waking life
3. working through difficult, complicated, unsettling thoughts, emotions, and experiences
4. responding to biochemical changes and electrical impulses that occur during sleep
5. consciousness uniting past, present, and future in processing information from the first two, and preparing for the third
6. self-protection by the brain to prepare itself to face threats, dangers and challenges

It's interesting, but also interesting that after so much time and study we really still don't understand dreams.

Whatever they are, I wouldn't mind so much if my brain would just stick to its usual stupid themes -- work and walking around places and hotels. No more animated dead, please, stupid head.