10:16 p.m. In today's New York Times Science Section the big color front-page story is about scientific theory and dream theory, and how the two are beginning to converge. Scientists have never had much truck with dreams, it seems. Too messy. For most of them, a dream is merely a random firing of electrons across the brain -- a series of harmless flashes of heat lightning lighting the landscape of the night.

And yet, oddly enough, one of the scientists in the article, Dr. Allan Hobson of Harvard, has "filled 109 volumes with his own dreams over the years," according to the paper. Strange behavior, don't you think, for a biological psychiatrist who still believes that dreams are merely a function of neurotransmitter chemicals in the brainstem? He must find his own brainstem quite the thing.

Now for my money, I don't think it's all that important where in the brain dreams originate, or for how long each night an individual dreams. It's nice that some scientists still want to debunk Freud's Interpretation of Dreams and some still want to resuscitate his theories. But sometimes a scientist is just a scientist, you know?

What I would really like to have a scientist explain is the nature of time in our dreaming brain. Have you ever fallen asleep at your desk or maybe in an uncomfortable chair for a few seconds and then jerked wide awake again? Of course you have. And have you ever had an extremely vivid dream in those few seconds? Once again, I'll bet you have.

Now let's say that because the TV or radio was on when you dozed off, you were able to note with absolute certainty that you'd only been gone for a few seconds. Maybe you're in class and you know the teacher's droning voice and you hear the beginning of the sentence ... and by the time your elbow knocks the book off the edge of the desk and wakes you up ... it's only been a flash of time and the teacher hasn't even finished her thought.

But then ... you recall the dream.

And let's say you've got pretty good dream recall and you start thinking about the story line that just played itself out in your brain. If you try to recount in awake-time every little nuance, every long alleyway you ran down, all the twists and turns in the chase, the big puddle you jumped over ... it will take your awake-brain many many minutes to even touch on the high points.

Now, I ask you: how can this be? Do we have a fast-forward ability to think like Superman when we are dreaming? And then it just goes dormant when we wake up? Or, is dream-time somehow really different than awake-time? And, if the latter is so, which is the real-time?

Do you understand how profoundly disturbing this riddle is?

It means either that we're capable of vastly different modes of thought than we know of in our waking days, or it means that there are at least two different time experiences that we, as humans, are capable of.

One is the mysterious all-inclusive dream speed ... where you can have a whole, complicated, multi-character, blow-by-blow story line that you are totally involved in wandering through, carefully and profoundly ... in the actual time it takes for you to nod off at your desk, drop the pen and jerk back awake ...

... and the other is the dreary day-to-day speed that slows down and down and down ... gets back down to the speed I think as I write this and you think as you read this.

Isn't it odd that we can do both? Does that mean thoughts don't necessarily have to abide by the linear grid that traps our mortal bodies? And could there really be more than one dictatorial clock for us all?

Just some random firing thoughts, right? We may be far more magical than we can dream.

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I recently found a new (to me) journal that has fine daily entries worth bookmarking and reading with great pleasure ... but with an additional section that is just beyond wonderful: a dream journal that is strange and quirky and sometimes even has illustrations.

Give yourself lots of time to explore My Jaded Journey.