And a little bit of This

Sometimes, after a full-night's rest, I wake up feeling as though I've lived the past 7-10 hours in a parallel universe. The feeling is so overwhelming that I'm undoubtedly certain of the existence of a Parallel Me. (Hah, P.M. Get it?)

It's supposed (by brain scientists) that your subconscious plays out all the daily items of unfiltered substance during your snooze time. The details of your life that go unnoticed to the naked eye are vacuumed up by your involuntary senses every 30 seconds of your day. Between morning rush hour, incessant admin meetings, and the perils of family life, your brain simply tucks the little bits of phone calls, familiar faces, and extra cups of coffee away for another time. The next day, you wonder why you were dreaming about your dead aunt calling you from a phone booth in Mumbai, berating you for making her cappuccino without enough pepper spray.

Easy to speculate then that your dreams are just the mumblings of your prefrontal cortex on laughing gas.

But what about the dreams that aren't quite clear? The ones that shadow over the beginning of your day, as you rub your eyes and yawn, and swear you were just there in a boat with a purple octopus? There is something so unclear about their manifestation, something eerily familiar; you are convinced that your Parallel Me was up to her usual travels in the Land of Lucidity.

I suppose that belief in PMs are also a way of keeping our sanity. All those witty retorts you had stored up for infuriating moments? The moments of incredulity over what seemed to be a two-hour long meeting on the effectiveness of the refrigerator in the staff lounge? The aggravation you felt when informed by your best friend that she's canceling on your birthday party (again)...? All these inner monologues are delightfully splayed across the vast sky of your dreamscapes - bright, colorful things that shock and inspire your Ambivalent Me to live the life she dreams about. Blinking off the shady cloud of another PM adventure, you swear that you can still see these striking subconscious images behind your tired little eyelids, and that one thought stays with you until about 11 am on Thursday, at which time you become too absorbed in another day's work to filter it's relevance.