Ask Abbie: Dreams of Zach Braff, Zach Braff, Zach Braff

Good morning sweet chicklings. I hope you all had a good night’s rest and are taking on your day with gusto. Did you know that “chickling” can refer to a baby chick or chicken as well as a vetch or pea? A vetch, a widely distributed scrambling herbaceous plant of the pea family, is extensively cultivated in Southern Europe for its seed. Its seed is eaten like the chick-pea, but is said to be of superior quality. I shall let you decide which meaning of chickling you would like to take my term of endearment as. You truly cannot go wrong with either.

So my dear vetches and fowls, pray tell, how have your dreams been as of recent times? Are your unconscious hours being filled with interesting successions of images, ideas, emotions and sensations? Are they occurring involuntarily, or are you one of the lucky few who have mastered the art of lucid dreaming or astral projecting? 

Dreams are a constant topic of discussion in my circle. The mysteriousness and philosophical ideologies behind dreams are debated, theories and meanings are questioned and experiments are tested. Recently a friend of mine and I were trying to get the dream version of the other conscious within the other’s dreams, a perplexing operation to maneuver and succeed in as you may be able to imagine. 

While my friend and I have not yet succeeded in maneuvering the other to consciously enter our dreams, we unintentionally had a synchronous dream, which is something I had never experienced. This occurred the other night, when my friend and I fell asleep next to each other. When we woke up, we naturally turned to one another to ask about each other’s dreams. Well, you can imagine my surprise as they began to tell me their dream and casually mentioned that Zach Braff – the actor and producer most commonly known for his role of J.D. in Scrubs – was in it. This came as a shock to me because Zach Braff had been in MY dream that night too. 

 It would have made sense that Zach Braff could have been in both of our dreams if we had been talking about him or watching a film he was acting in sometime in the near past, but none of the above had occurred, making it a truly phenomenal experience. Before I continue, can we take a moment to talk about how good of a name Zach Braff is? Zach Braff, Zach Braff, Zach Braff, Zach Braff. Okay I’m good now. Truly stumped on how our dreams synchronized themselves so well, I was trying to come up with a reason for this occurrence. Was it our close head proximity? Do parallel dreams occur once you’ve crossed a certain number of hours spent with a person? 

Dreams are honestly just so weird. Sometimes you have recurring dreams, other times random people pop into them. Every now and then they’ll predict something that will happen. They are truly a toss up. I have so many questions: What do they all mean? Is the person you’re dreaming about really thinking or dreaming about you? Who is to say the symbols that are interpreted to mean one thing actually are correct? Are the people writing dream dictionaries being told this information from a higher realm or are they just creating it based on cultural contexts?

While my skepticism leads me to believe that we as a society will never have honest answers about dreams, that only makes dreams cooler and more mysterious. I hope you all are able to have happy and interesting dreams, and if you’re not, perhaps try burning a piece of paper with your dream nuisances on it. Oh, and before I say goodnight, if you’re trying out any new dream experiments and testing new theories, please let me know, I would love to test them as well… seriously. Email me.