Afterwards there is a celebration, and the sky turns into a multitude of blue, and mariachi music hums in the background.

The dream shifts into a desert landscape, sun beating down on cracked ground. I’m on a school trip, and we’re walking in a line through the desert of small boulders and dead puppies. The bodies of the dead puppies littered just as far as the endless stretch of land.

I trip along the road, and my mouth meets the sandy dirt, the taste of grit and dog on my tongue.

The dream was so strange to me that I looked it up. I’ve heard about dream dictionaries and the idea of interpreting dreams before, but have never thought about trying it. There were many websites on the Internet that had differing interpretations, but what I found was that dogs represent loyalty and emotional protection. A dead dog means the loss of a friend or instincts.

When I read this, everything made sense. The dead dogs, the departing train and her “goodbye” sealed the deal. I lost a friend — a breakup long overdue. However, it wasn’t until I had the dream that I realized that it was time to cut the tie. My dream told me something that I had already intuitively known but had never considered.

Perhaps society and being a literature major has conditioned me to analyze everything, but I view dreams as revelations. Not the kind where the light bulb turns on, but a discovery of the self.

I have been writing down my dreams since my sophomore year of high school. When the notebooks began to pile up and the files took up laptop space, I wondered why I was doing this and what to do with the material that I have gathered.

It can’t be for nothing. I feel that my dreams mean something; I want them to mean something.

I have thought about writing a book, which leads me to the realization that I would have to find some sort of theme to connect all the strange things that I dream about. I also realized that I would have to try to decipher my handwriting and make sense of what I wrote.

This was when I started to look into analyzing my dreams. I’m curious as to whether they have any meaning, or they were just a jumble of our sensory experiences and thoughts. Recurring dreams about being chased by a doll, when I used to love playing with them, make me wonder whether my unconscious is trying to tell me something.

It wasn’t until I had gotten that particular dead dogs dream that made me aware of how my dreams can reveal things that I wasn’t aware of.

I don’t know whether dreams tell you everything, or if it’s still clear cut whether they tell you anything at all. Maybe I was just trying to assign it meaning. If we spend a third of our life sleeping and a portion of that dreaming, looking up the strange dream you had the night before wouldn’t hurt.