I never end up writing down my dreams immediately after waking up. Usually, it’s because I’m in a rush to get to work, but sometimes it’s just because I’m lazy. Not that I think vivid dreams necessarily mean anything other than the fact that my sleep is fragmented enough that I wake up in time to remember my dreams, but it’s always interesting to re-read the weird things my brain comes up with from the flotsam and jetsam of my mundane life.

So what I dreamt was that I was watching a musical set in the Wild West, entitled something like “Inarra Amara” or something incongruous but assonant like that. It was about a husband and wife, and the husband’s brother, who were forced to abandon their homestead because of Apaches, Mexicans, or Confederates, I forget which exactly. So they move to this other town in the middle of nowhere and find a house. The wife gets pregnant. There’s a love triangle where the husband’s brother pines longingly for her but can never have her. And then the husband dies of dysentery (as do a lot of the townspeople) and there’s a really bad winter, and some really bad musical numbers, but the last scene I remember is the husband’s brother hesitantly approaching the now-widowed woman’s house as snow drifts down softly. I remember it seemed like it was a really artistic shot.

But then I end up missing the ending because I changed the channel to a Martin Lawrence cop-comedy that isn’t related to “Bad Boys” or “Big Momma’s House” where he and his partner who, now that I think of it, kind of reminds me of the Laker point guard Derrick Fisher, and they’re pretending they’re rappers or drug-dealers or something, but they have serious problems with their undercover role because they’re really just desk jockey nerds who inexplicably mistakenly get assigned to this case. So they crash their cars in high speed chases, forget they’re not supposed to brandish weapons openly because they’re not supposed to be cops, and have to act all hard when they’re really not.

And then I woke up.

The part that intrigues me about my dreams involving watching TV is the fact that sometimes I end up inside the TV show, often as one of the main characters (In the Western musical, there were parts where I was the husband’s brother, and other parts where I was the town’s doctor; in the cop-comedy, I was another cop who recognizes them but tries not to break their cover, but instead end up in a shoot out and a car chase with the bad guys.) Sometimes, though, I’m just some schmo, some redshirt, who ends up along for the ride, and the dream continues only as far as the plot requires my presence. Usually, when I get killed in the show, I end up waking up completely, but sometimes, it only dumps me back into the TV-watching dream (a la “Inception”) or even drops me into another dream entirely.

It turns out that my dreams are frequently multi-leveled. Ever since I read this New Age book about lucid dreaming and chakras and all sorts of vague spiritual mish-mash, and especially after I first watched “Inception”, I’ve tried my best to take control of my dreams whenever I got the chance. Usually trying too hard ends up waking me up though, so it’s kind of a tough balance. Sometimes, it ends up dropping me into an in-between state where I can feel I’m starting to wake up, but I’m somehow managing to hold on to the dream. How I know I’m waking up is because external stimuli from my room starts intruding into my dream (just like in “Inception”)—usually the sound of my alarm, or the noise coming through my open window.

Sometimes I end up waking up because I hang-on to the feeling of déjà-vu too long whenever I encounter something from my dream that is derived from something in real life that ends up mashed-up or remixed by my brain. (My brain tends to reuse existing topographical features like mountains, hills, and even roads and freeways, but then distorts them or puts novel buildings in places that I know they won’t be found in real life.) Whenever I realize where something I’m dreaming about came from, that usually wakes me up immediately.

But I rarely have vivid dreams in a row. I don’t know if a dream journal really increases the chances of having another one, or if it actually makes it less likely. I wonder how difficult it would be to find hard scientific data on oneirology.