Apparently those who study these things still don’t really know why or how we dream. There are many competing theories. One I heard recently is that when we sleep our brain essentially empties the mental trash can, and so what we see in dreams are the things that our brain is in the process of discarding. Because our brains spend their waking hours making sense of disconnected things, they can sometimes do that with the things that go by on the way to disposal during sleep, and that’s what dreams are. I find that theory plausible. I am one of those people who not only regularly remembers dreams (at least one and often more per night), but has elaborately plotted dreams, with many twists and turns and much detail. I can often trace pieces of dreams to different things I’d thought about or seen recently, although the dreams themselves are generally much more momentous and convoluted than whatever bits and pieces may have inspired them. If the theory about dreams being the recycling bin of the mind is true, I wonder if it’s my storytelling ability that helps explain the prevalence of dreams (or my memory of them). Because it feels a bit like what I do when I write songs. I didn’t grow up thinking of myself as a storyteller. I’ve never particularly been drawn to writing prose fiction, never had a novel in me waiting to get out, didn’t even do that much pretend play as a child. But it’s become increasingly obvious to me that most of my songwriting involves storytelling. And that I’m actually pretty good at telling those stories, whether they come from real life (Between the White Lines), imagination (How I Got to Jackson; Bigger, Faster, and More) or some combination (Crawfordsville, Fiddle Player, Fun Will Find a Way). Stories are embedded in almost every song I write, even the ones that are just presenting a moment (my newest song – The Disarray) or a state of mind (Your Eyes). What I love about songwriting is figuring out what those stories are, since I don’t go into the writing knowing where the song is going to end (or even where it might go in the middle). I’m pretty sure I’ve told the story of writing How I Got To Jackson before, but it’s illustrative. I woke up one morning with the line “that’s how I got to Jackson” running through my head. With no more to go on than that, it still seemed like a good premise for a song, so I started writing, think about how it was that I might have gotten to Jackson. I started out with transportation and geography, with the thought in the back of my mind that perhaps it was a song about a breakup and that’s why I was going to Jackson. But as I was writing and singing what I wrote, a line that I’d initially thought of as “keep on moving to outrun the pain” came out instead as “to outrun the shame” and I suddenly thought “wow – that’s a much more interesting story; I need to see where that one goes.” And that’s the song I ended up writing, and it’s much more powerful than a standard heartbreak song would have been. That feels a lot like the process that would happen if my brain is taking images and trying to fit them together into some kind of connection among them in the process of dreaming. And maybe the reason I’m good at doing that when I’m awake is that I’m good at doing it when I’m asleep (or vice versa). I create narrative out of words and images. I tell stories.