99998989

After a couple of days holiday from dreamland, my calculator returned with this big fat figure. No punctuation, just a stream of high digits - only a thousand-odd short of the largest number it is capable of expressing. So much to say, so little screen...

So where has it been these last two days? Probably like me, it sometimes has to wait for the inspiration to strike. I can hardly ever remember any of my dreams, although I recall diving underwater last night to catch a sinking ship and drag it to the surface - I remember thinking at the time that this was pretty far-fetched, but hey.

Unlike life, you rarely chose your journey when you sleep. This may be our brain's way of testing our ability to cope with unpredictable situations, although its more likely just random nonsense that spills out of our memory, and our mind fills in the gaps by weaving a story around it.

Scientists would like to think that dreaming serves some kind of purpose, that we give ourselves virtual scenarios to battle with, so that we might be better at coping with real life threats. People love to assign purpose to the unexplainable - its a human instinct. Every consequence has a cause, every event is a part of a story. We percieve the world as a sequence of events - our brains organise this into stories with beginnings, middles and ends, to make sense of the unfamiliar world we are thrust into at birth. In a way we are anthropomorphising the universe: its not just a collection of stars and dust - it has a life story, which science is currently spending the most part of its budget attempting to recount. Like us, it was born, is getting on with its life, and will eventually die in some way or another.

Religions are born out of our need to explain our origins. There will probably be an evolutionary reason for this trait, but the fact remains that we are designed to read meanings and purpose into everything around us, and this extends to the dream world. So are we rehearsing threatening situations when we sleep, or are our brains just dredging up random rubbish and tying it together with surreal storylines?

If anything I would say dreams are our way of exercising our ability to convert random information into meaningful reality. Either that or they are a by-product of some other process in the organisation of our memories, a web woven from the firing of dormant synapses.

Or in the case of my calculator, the play of dust dancing over its sleeping microchips.