Early this morning, I woke up from a vivid dream with a full narrative that saw someone visit a rural home, and fell in love with the idea of raising chickens and converted an abandoned barn into a chicken coop. It had sensors, and soft morning light (Casper Glow Light maybe?) to wake up the chicken to leave. There were low voltage perimeter walls to keep out the foxes and all other predators. It seems like the “someone” hadn’t figured out how to deal with the reptiles, but nevertheless — let’s just say the damn dream felt too real. 

Now where did that come from? And then I realized: this Saturday morning, I was scrolling through my friend Brian Lam’s Instagram stories. One of them was about his three chickens trying to play with a leaf Brian dropped in the coop. 

Why this happens is because of something called the “continuity hypothesis” according to a Wired article, Do you dream in Internet, don’t freak out. “Dreams really rarely replay a memory exactly as it was experienced, but rather integrate some of its elements into a broader, distorted narrative,” Raphael Vallat, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California Berkeley told the magazine. 

I often start writing a blog post when awake, but it is when I am fast asleep the whole thing writes itself in my head, so counting my chickens before they hatch in my dreams shouldn’t be that unusual? 

May 24, 2020, San Francisco