Good dreams.

Ever since I was a little girl, I have had vivid dreams. My mother has told me that I used to talk about my dreams at the breakfast table and retell them in full detail. I've heard about keeping a dream journal by your bed so that you can recount your dream before you forget it, but I don't usually need help recounting my dreams. They stay with me for most of the day ... or week, and some of them, for years.

In fact, I remember one dream that I had when I was home for a summer during college. It seemed to go on for days, and in the dream I was with a little baby girl. She was about 8 months old, bald, chubby and the cutest little thing. We had spent so much time together in the dream that when I was without her in my waking reality, I actually cried when I told my dad about it because it had been so real and I missed her so much. I had a sad day.

I often have dreams about celebrities too. It is almost always the same scenario with them ... we meet at a mutual friend's party, hang out for a little while and I leave thinking how much fun they were to get to know. I have spent time with Michael J. Fox, Michael Jackson, George Michael, Keith Urban, Ellen, Oprah and just last week - Brad Pitt. (I know, so fun, huh?) There was only one dream where I actually left the party with someone ... that would be Jon Bon Jovi. He gave me a ride home in his truck and kissed me goodnight. That was a really good dream, I adore Jon Bon Jovi.

Fortunately, I don't have many bad dreams. The few that I have had over the years, I can still remember though. When my oldest daughter was just a toddler, and I was working in L.A., I dreamt that there was a huge tidal wave that was literally a wall of water heading for Los Angeles. (And then about 20 years later they made a movie just like that ... I should have written the screenplay first - kind of like Stephanie Meyer did with her dream, calling it Twilight .... hmmmm.)

Anyway, in the dream, I was frantically running up stairs in various buildings trying to get McCall from daycare before the wave hit us, but I couldn't find her. I remember my mom telling me that those kinds of dreams put your body through the same kind of stress because your mind doesn't realize it was just a dream - I found that very interesting. (Maybe that also explains why, when I have a lot going on in my dream, I am tired the next day.)

I had a co-worker years ago, who would ask me each morning what I had dreamt about so we could try to figure out what it meant together. I have gotten pretty good at analyzing my own dreams through the years ... I have found that when my dreams are crazy and chaotic, it is when my own life is too busy - my dream is probably sending a message that I need to slow down and refocus. I have read that there is an absolute correlation between what we dream and our waking lives - and we can figure out what they mean if we "learn the language of our dreams."

I know a lot of people dream about flying, but I don't normally have dreams where I fly. The closest thing I had to that (and more than once), was running so fast that my feet left the ground, so I was running in the air at a super charged pace ... kind of like the "road runner".

But last week, I dreamed that I was sky diving with a friend. We were free falling without any parachutes. We talked on our way down, admiring how beautiful it was, and when I was just about to reach the ground, my body slowly stopped, I stepped out of the "fall" and onto the ground and walked away.

The whole dream was pretty amazing, but the end ... very, very cool.