You might, as Tom Waits said, be innocent when you dream. But if you think about some of the dreams you’ve had, you might wonder if you’re normal.

I’m on some medication that suppresses REM sleep. One of its side effects is that if you forget to take it, you have very vivid –- and often rather weird – dreams. By “weird,” I don’t mean violent or upsetting or sexual or anything like that. They’re just chock-full of odd juxtapositions. During this semester break, when my routine has radically changed, I haven’t been as diligent as I should’ve been in taking the medication, so some of my nights have been interesting, to say the least.

I am no great believer in dreams as portents or anything like that. But they fascinate me. There have been many times when I’ve awakened and wondered just what was rolling around in my subconscious.

The other night, I dreamed about someone I hadn’t even thought about, much less seen, in many years. His name was Scott and we went through school together, from elementary to high school. We weren’t great buddies, but we were cordial. He was a pretty nice guy. I always got the impression his home life was a bit dicey; I think his parents were pretty laissez faire. I do remember that one of Scott’s favorite things to do in elementary school was show people the nude picture of his brother’s girlfriend that Scott kept in his wallet. I don’t know how it got there. I didn’t want to know then and I don’t really want to know now.

Anyway, in my dream, I was staying over at Scott’s house and his father started beating him. He punched Scott in the throat and I said something to the old man, at which point I woke up.

I have to wonder, what was it that made Scott push his way into the part of my brain that builds dreams? Why was his father beating him? I never met the guy and as I recall, Scott never showed any evidence of having been abused. I guess I just have to chock it up to the mysteries of the subconscious.

I’ve often wondered where some of the people in my dreams come from. When you dream an unfamiliar face, who is it? Is it somebody you saw on the street that day, a face that didn’t register on your conscious mind but somehow imprinted itself on your subconscious? Or is it a sort of police composite of people you know?

Of course, some dreams are easily explained. About once or twice a year, I dream that my Dad and I are arguing. Now, my Dad and I got along fine. But as with any father-son relationship, there were issues. And when he died 16 years ago, there were a lot of things I wanted to talk about that we had never gotten a chance to discuss. They will forever be in the ether now and that’s just a cross I have to bear. I hate those dreams, but there isn’t much I can do to change their root cause. That’s life.

At least I can be grateful that my dreams are relatively benign, even when they’re weird. I’ve known people who are tormented by nightmares virtually every night and that is hellish.

Probably the weirdest dream I’ve ever had would be a nightmare to some people, but it was so unbelievably vivid that I woke up less horrified than fascinated.

I was in the gas chamber. I don’t know what it was that had put me there, but I must’ve been guilty; at no time did I think, “Oh my God, they’re executing me and I’m innocent.” As the part I remember started, the door was being shut and I was enclosed by institutional-green walls. I heard a plop as the cyanide pellets dropped into the acid and I began to smell almonds, which is what cyanide gas smells like (part of the problem is I happen to know strange factoids like that). My thoughts began to get disjointed and I remember, in a final moment of lucidity, thinking, “This must be what it’s like to die.”

Then I woke up.

A lot of people probably would be terrified by a dream like that, but its vividness left me deeply intrigued. The sickly color of the walls, the pressure of the leather straps on my arm, the sweet almond smell (it’s the only time I ever recall smelling something in a dream). My first thought was, “Man, that was interesting.”

Again, as with most of my dreams, I don’t know what brought it on. I wasn’t in any particular waking torment and life was pretty good, as I recall. But still, somewhere, some part deep in my brain was thinking about execution, or at least my death. I think. Or I just have to stop reading things that tell me factoids like what cyanide gas smells like.

I’ve made no effort to study dreams, much as they interest me, so the answer may be out there somewhere. Maybe it isn’t even a matter of the subconscious. Maybe dreams are just random electrical impulses that somehow form pictures when you’re asleep. Maybe they mean nothing. Maybe they mean everything. Almost certainly, we’ll never really know.

But to me, it’s one of the most fascinating mysteries about an organ unique in the known universe, the human brain. A couple of pounds of flimsy, gelatinous tissue separates us from every other being on God’s earth. It is capable of the loftiest thoughts and of conceiving the greatest evil. It reminds us to breathe and it inspires the Sistine Chapel. Occasionally, it puts us in the gas chamber, either literally or mentally. If it goes haywire, we can become lost souls.

And ironically enough, we haven’t quite been able to get it to tell all it knows about us, whether dreaming or awake.