‘Do we control our brains or do our brains control us?’

Isn’t it funny, if not slightly worrying, how irrationally our minds can work sometimes as you get older. They seem to take on a life of their own and shoot off in all sorts of directions, which you hadn’t specified, or even thought of.

We tend to call it ‘day-dreaming’ when it happens, but it’s something a little more than that. It doesn’t happen when I’m just sitting in a chair in the garden, with the warm sun beating down on me, the soft hum of bees hypnotising me and the delicious perfume from all the flowers my wife has planted, lulling my brain, that comes under the heading of dozing rather than day-dreaming; it’s almost a conscious effort, the very reason you sat out there in the first place. No, it’s that slightly unnerving experience you get (and it can happen anywhere and any time), that the thing or idea you are considering at that very moment suddenly decides to wander off, on its own.

It feels as though someone or something has turned off a switch in your head, causing your brain to reject it, and there’s nothing you can do about it. The trouble is, I don’t know about you, but in my case, once the brain decides on this action, it is a very powerful machine, way beyond my capabilities to change its direction. You then sit or stand there for about five minutes, a slightly irritated look on your face, as you will your brain to give the idea back to you, so you can continue with it, because you are totally convinced that it was something exquisitely important you were thinking about, and your whole life will change if you don’t recover it! But then there is the odd occasion when you do manage to grab the thought back again and you find, to your further irritation, that the world-shattering thing you were thinking about turns out to be something like “I must remember to check the tyre pressures, next time I fill up the tank”. Not very world changing at all, was it?

One of the other rather annoying tricks my brain plays on me, now that I’m an old man; it puts me in dreams of the utmost reality! They are so real that people I have known for years appear in them, sometimes in rather sinister locations, we get involved in situations that slightly worry me because there appears to be no way out, or it’s going to cost me either a lot of money, or the loss of something very important to me, like my smartphone, for instance. Now that’s all very well, but I often wake up at this stage of the drama and for several minutes I am still in that realistic dream.

My own bedroom looks unfamiliar to me, my wife lying asleep next to me appears to be, not her, but the person I was dealing with in the dream, and the problems I encountered in there still haunt me. Then my brain latches onto something that is familiar, like the LED alarm clock on my bedside cabinet and other things gradually click into reality, kicking out the silly ideas of my dream. Finally, I come fully awake and realise the dream problem I was trying to solve doesn’t actually exist at all, and I can get back to sleep in a much happier frame of mind.

I never used to get dreams of such reality when I was young and I sometimes wonder why I (and I hope many other older individuals), get this effect, almost each night, even to the extent that I can, or rather do, return to last night’s dream and carry on the story from where I left off the night before. I wouldn’t say it worries me, but it can be a bit disconcerting, because I sometimes wonder if the time will come when I get up, still asleep, and physically join in the story, rather than just lying in bed ‘thinking’ it!

At least I have been reassured, by experts, that if you are aware of your loss of memory, you don’t suffer from Alzheimer’s, it’s just that your old brain is so crammed with a million memories or more that it takes the poor thing some time to either store new ones, or to find old ones, and it will sometimes dump one memory, in order to load up some new idea that appears interesting to it. We have to accept the fact that we are all just the vehicle our brains use to get it from place ‘A’ to place ‘B’, or idea ‘X’ to idea ‘Y’. We just have to learn to live with it — and I must admit, that beats dying any day!

Do you have a story to share with Starts at 60? We want to publish it. Sign up as a contributor and submit your stories to Starts at 60. Stories written by over-60s go into the draw for some great weekly prizes. You can also join the Starts at 60 Bloggers Club on Facebook to talk to other writers in the Starts at 60 community and learn more about how to write for Starts at 60.