A Dream to the Tenth Power. I Don't Know How. I Don't Know Why.

The What?

I woke up this morning from one of the strangest, most detailed, most absurdly cinematic dreams I've had in a while — and if you knew my track record with dreams, you'd understand that's really saying something.

Here's what my subconscious decided to produce, and direct, while I was asleep:

There's a guy, slightly balding, a bit overweight, massive gut stretching out a green leotard and he's standing in a dimly lit room holding a slightly oversized martini glass. A beat is pulsing as my consciousness slowly enters the scene. It's not background music playing, not ambient noise, but a rather catchy, rhythmic, beat, the kind of thing that would get stuck in your head if it existed outside my skull, and it's fully engulfing the entirety of the whole scene. The guy, he's swaying to it, arms slightly outstretched, and then he leans back — full Big Lebowski lean back — and takes a huge sip from the martini glass, arms stretched wide with his head tilted back, and he just vibes.

Then it zooms into him quickly and the scene changes.

Now it's a three-quarter bird's-eye view of what looks like a prison cafeteria floor, rows of tables, and there's absolute chaos everywhere. People in red leotards are fighting people in blue leotards, people in green leotards are mixed into the mess, and right in the center of all of it is a woman. Green leotard. Number 10. She's doing the same Lebowski lean-back, arms out, stretching, swaying rhythmically, completely unbothered by the brawl that's erupting around her. She takes a sip from whatever she's holding — a glass, maybe a paper cup, the fine details are getting foggy as I write this — but then she throws it down.

And then the lyrics kick in: 🎶 I don't know how. I don't know why. And I don't know when. But I know it's to the power of 10. 🎶

My brain wrote a song, in my sleep, with a hook, and even though it's hard to convey in a blog post, trust me when I say it was darn catchy. Imagine a spark of rhythm bouncing around inside your brain like a rubber ball in a tiled hallway—bright, playful, and impossible to make sit still.

As soon as she throws her drink down the lyrics kick in and she just goes HAM. She cold clocks the person next to her, sprints across the floor, tackles a guy, pops back up, falls backwards into a group of people, elbows one in the head, knees another. She's fighting with this strange dancing quality to it, like she doesn't care about defense at all. Someone shoves her from behind and she doesn't even turn around, she just absorbs the hit and punches the person in front of her, she keeps moving. She's mopping the floor with the red team, and when someone from blue gets brave enough to step up, she clotheslines them without breaking stride, like some sort of disco spartan.

The whole time, that song is looping. 🎶 I don't know how. I don't know why. I don't know when. But I know it's to the power of 10. 🎶

I woke suddenly, interrupting the chaos mid-riot, up somewhere in-between laughing and bewildered. The song was repeating in my head as I got up to get a glass of water and returned to bed. I frequently wake up throughout the night. As I'm smiling to myself and crawling back into bed I'm just shaking my head like what the heck was that?? My head hit the pillow and I'm back in the same dream.

This time it repeated the sequence, gut in a leotard now has the number 10 as well, the same beat is rhythmically pulsing, he leans back like The Dude, takes a sip and it zooms into the the lady, number 10, same lean back, but this time she takes a sip and throws her drink down and looks at me. It's her face I see and she has footballer's eye-black under her eyes but it's green and yellow, and she has a wild smirk like she's know that I know what's about to happen. The lyrics start and she brings the hurt like never before. She's got moves, she's got skill, she's got zero F**ks to give, and she's haphazardly tearing people up to the most catchy song I've heard.

My Brain Has Always Done This

Here's the thing — this isn't unusual for me. Not the content, necessarily (the green leotard fight club with original music was a new one), but the vividness. I've had dreams this detailed, this immersive, this real for as long as I can remember.

I'm not talking about the kind of vivid where you wake up and go "oh, that was a weird one." I mean the kind where you can feel textures, hear specific sounds, see colors with a clarity that sometimes exceeds waking life. The kind where you wake up and need a few seconds to recalibrate which reality you're actually in... where you question reality a bit.

And it goes beyond just being extremely vivid. I've had lucid dreams — many times, going back years. Most of the time, becoming lucid is actually what ends the dream for me. I realize I'm dreaming, and I start saying "I'm dreaming, I'm dreaming" over and over, almost like a mantra to pull myself out — and it works. I carry that phrase from the dream state all the way through to waking, mouthing it out loud as my eyes open. My wife can confirm this is deeply unsettling to witness in the middle of the night and it's startled her more times than I'd care to admit.

The laughing is worse. Sometimes I'll be laughing in the dream and it follows me straight through to consciousness — I'll open my eyes still laughing with this bewildered amusement for why I'm cackling. That one really scares my wife. She's said sometimes is a light giggle and other times she's told me I sound like a maniac, manically cackling in pure darkness. The poor woman hasn't slept in close to 16 years.

Then there's the screaming. That happens too. Same mechanism — the sound travels from dream to waking — and yeah, that's the one that probably concerns her the most. Nightmares for me are traumatic. I've learned to process them, breathe, and can move past them with ease now, but in my youth they could derail my entire day leaving me almost detached and scared for hours after waking.

But the lucid dreams where I maintain control? Those are something else entirely. I've had some where I had full awareness that I was dreaming and basically became a superhero. In one I was flying around this strange city, messing with people by amazing them with what I could do. Full control. Full awareness. It was exhilarating in a way that's hard to articulate to someone who hasn't experienced it. I knew I was dreaming and stayed dreaming in order to explore the world I found myself in with uncanny clarity, sometimes only waking when I chose to, when I began to get philosophical and needed to return to waking reality.

I had another one — part of a series of recurring dreams — where I gained lucidity and the dream noticed. That's the only way I can describe it. It felt like the dream itself recognized that I'd become aware, and it turned hostile. It started fighting back, trying to get me. I remember feeling like it wanted to hurt me — genuinely wanted to end me — and I woke up shaken in a way that lingered for days.

Then there are the ones that I still can't fully explain. Dreams with details I couldn't have known, specific things I'd never learned or encountered in waking life, that I later researched and found to be accurate. I don't have a framework for that, and I'm not going to pretend I do, but it's happened enough times that I've stopped dismissing it.

My mom gets it — she knows, and my wife gets it because she lives with the evidence, but I'm pretty sure most other people I've told assume I'm exaggerating. Honestly? I don't care so much. I know what I experience. The laughing-to-waking, the speaking-from-dream-to-consciousness, the screaming — those aren't things you can fabricate. They're involuntary and witnessed, and although very subjective at least able to be corroborated to some degree.

Sometimes if feels like a gift, and other times like a burden.

The Brain as World-Builder

What gets me thinking, especially after a dream like this one, is the sheer creative capacity of the sleeping brain. My subconscious didn't just generate a random sequence of images, it built a scene with spatial awareness, choreographed a fight with physical dynamics, composed a song with lyrics and rhythm, and maintained internal consistency across the whole thing. The woman was number 10. The song referenced the power of 10. The green team was color-coded. There was narrative logic to the chaos, and when I awoke and then returned to sleep, it maintained complete consistency while adding to it and expanding it.

I didn't plan any of that. I wasn't directing it. I was the audience in my own private theater, and whatever part of my brain runs the show at night put together something more creative than most things I could produce on purpose.

That's the part that fascinates me — and, if I'm being honest, that I think we still massively underestimate. We spend so much time talking about artificial intelligence generating content, and meanwhile, most sleeping humans on Earth are running their own generative engines, building worlds from scratch, populating them with characters, giving those characters dialogue and motivation and physical presence — all in real-time, all without conscious direction.

I'm not one for woo-woo explanations. I'm grounded in reality, and I like it here, but I'm also not afraid to sit with the questions that dreams raise, because some of them are hard to answer. Where do the details come from when they're things I've never encountered? What's the mechanism behind a dream recognizing that the dreamer has become aware? Why does the brain compose original music with catchy hooks while the rest of me is unconscious? I'm a creative with an active mind, sure, but wow, what an experience it is to sleep and dream.

There's real science here — REM sleep, memory consolidation, the default mode network doing its thing — and I find all of that interesting, but there's also the edge where science shrugs and says "we're not entirely sure," and that's where it gets fun to think about. Quantum effects, multiverse theory, the deeply weird nature of consciousness itself — I'm not claiming any of those explain my green leotard dream, but I'm not not thinking about them either because who really know what is going on? It's probably just neurons, or maybe like Scrooge conjectured, it's probably just a piece of undigested beef, but it feels like there's something more grave than the gravy going on here.

What I Take From It

I don't have a grand thesis here. I'm not going to tie this up in a neat bow and tell you what dreams mean or that the power of 10 is secretly a message from the universe. It was a weird, hilarious, incredibly detailed dream, and I wanted to write it down before it faded — because they always fade. This one inspired me to write a bit about it as it seemed worth keeping.

I will say this: I think we dismiss our dream lives too quickly. We wake up, we shake it off, we get to the coffee, and most of the time, that's the right move, but every once in a while, your brain hands you something so vivid, so specific, so produced that it deserves a second look. Not for mystical reasons — just for the sheer appreciation of what your mind is capable of when you're not steering it.

My brain choreographed a fight scene set to original music, in a color-coded prison brawl, starring a woman in a green leotard who fights like she dances, and it did all of that while I was unconscious.

I don't know how. I don't know why. And I don't know when it'll do something like that again.

But I know it's to the power of 10.

Someone come get your boy and check on my wife.