430: Every Damn Morning

Every Damn Morning

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Title text: There was something about a cup and a sword and a tree and a green hill...

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Explanation

Cueball has had a wondrous and striking dream (seemingly involving various action-packed escapades with Megan and/or on board a Zeppelin), including, among other things, a swordfight and a nuclear detonation, but is unable to recount it to Megan, as he has forgotten it by the time he reaches her at the table downstairs, indicated by the dream fading and losing detail. The title of the strip suggests that this is a regular occurrence: he wakes up with vivid memories of elaborate and fascinating dreamscapes, but is unable to tell anyone about it, because the memories fade so quickly, he's lost almost everything before he gets the chance.

Most people have trouble remembering the majority of their dreams, or only remember the most significant or recent parts. A contributor to this phenomenon is that the ability to store long-term memories is largely switched off during REM sleep, meaning that experiences within dreams typically only last from a few minutes to seconds in memory. Furthermore, levels of norepinephrine, a neurotransmitter critical for attention and memory formation, also drop to near zero during REM sleep. Without this chemical signal, the brain cannot encode experiences normally. There are also theories that the brain naturally discards memories from dreams so that people do not confuse those mental fabrications with real-life events.

The title text is a reference to C. S. Lewis's novel The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, in which Lucy Pevensie reads a story that “refreshes her spirit” – “That is the loveliest story I’ve ever read or ever shall read in my whole life. Oh, I wish I could have gone on reading it for ten years.” – but afterwards can only remember that it had something to do with "a cup and a sword and a tree and a green hill." A cup and a sword are also present near the center of the dream, with a large mushroom cloud in the background that could be misinterpreted upon recollection as a tree; these items possibly serving as another reference and/or providing further context to the title text.

The various parts of the dream are common in xkcd. Zeppelins were seen before in 73: Zeppelin and 288: Elevator, and continue to be a recurring theme. Another effort to remember dreams was made in 269: TCMP.

Transcript

[In the background, a vivid dream scene is apparent, where sets of Cueball and Megan interact in various action packed scenes, involving a mountain range with a blimp overhead, a city with a mushroom cloud and a blimp anchored to a building, a Zeppelin in the foreground which a Cueball clings to as a Megan falls, Megan climbing off of the blimp to a Cueball with a rope, a Megan using a sword to pin down a Cueball over a cup of spilled liquid, another set holding hands, another set looking at a laptop, another set hugging, another set sliding down a separate rope from the blimp and a final set falling. All in all, this seems very much like a wild, apocalyptic adventure and not something one would forget easily. In the inset, Cueball awakens, excited.]

Cueball: !!!

[Dream's edges are fading, mountains, city, and Zeppelin less clear. In the inset, Cueball is seen running down stairs.]

[Zeppelin has faded out of view; city, and mountains are very faded and unclear. The people can still be seen. In the inset, Cueball gets the attention of Megan, who is sitting at a breakfast table.]

[The dream has almost completely faded; only the outlines of three people can still be seen. In the inset, Cueball looks confused while Megan picks up the cup in front of her.]

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Discussion

The explanation for comic 430: Every Damn Morning was selected by the Explanation Improvement Project as This Week's Explanation for Improvement after being nominated in September 2026 by Capycapybara. During that week, editors focused on expanding and polishing this explanation as part of an ongoing effort to keep older or under-developed explanations fresh and complete. (compare before and after)

Reminds me a bit of, The Dark is Rising, the alt text does. Not sure why. 173.245.52.206 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

The "some people interacting" all seem to be Cueball & Megan, doing various things. Wwoods (talk) 18:27, 5 February 2014 (UTC)

This perfectly explains my theory for the origin of Deja vu! You have a dream, but because you don't bother thinking about it when you wake up (The act of thinking about it moves it from your short term memory to your long term memory), it fades away to some inaccessible place in your brain. (It's not deleted. Nothing is ever deleted. It's just archived) Then, you see something in real live which, just for a split second, brings back the memory of your dream. But it disappears as soon as it appeared, before you can register it. This leaves you wondering what it is that feels so familiar.

If you suffer from lots of deja vu, try remembering your dreams first thing in the morning. Hannodb (talk) 09:19, 10 July 2014 (UTC + 2)

I have heard that most dreaming is associated with the right side of the brain (for example, right inferior parietal cortex: http://www.dreamscience.org/idx_science_of_dreaming_section-3.htm). If this is true, it would make sense that, upon awakening, the visual imagery of dreams is not transmitted well across the corpus callosum to the left side of the brain, where most language skills reside. If you cannot efficiently translate the images into words, you can't communicate them in words. Being quite complex and unusual, the dreams would then fade from memory.

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A possible alternate explanation for the dream in the comic, which actually ties into the title text; most of the people in the comic are calm; the giant "mushroom cloud" can also, due to the black and white nature of the comic, be interpretated as a giant tree with ring-shaped construction around it. Most of the people appear to be more or less calm, which implies that there isn't really an emergency. Also, there is a guy with a knocked over cup, being threatened by a girl with a sword, and everybody is on what appears to be a hill. Alternatively, the tree or one of the cities was built on a hill. Amaroq (KitsunePhoenix) (talk) 05:56, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

Honestly, I interpreted it as Cueball and Megan living in a nuclear warzone where a bomb went off every morning and Cueball got really annoyed at how loud it was and how it was disrupting his sleep. 108.162.215.70 04:10, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

Funnily enough, I remember my dreams clearly, and sometimes remember them for days afterwards, even if they are totally insignificant. Does this happen to anyone else? Beanie (talk) 14:18, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

I think the tree in the title text to referring to the fact that the mushroom cloud looks like a tree. If the dream faded enough, one might see the mushroom cloud as a tree. BlackBeret (talk) 17:30, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
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