The persistence of anger

Something odd happened this morning, as I was waking up. Something which I have not noticed before, certainly not recently, but something which perhaps tells us something about the nature of feelings.

I was having a dream in the course of which I became angry about something, not with somebody but about something that the somebody was doing. Which was slightly odd in itself, to be angry about the action but not with the actor. Or actress in this particular case.

But what I found really odd came a little later. I had more or less woken up, I knew that I had been dreaming, but I was still angry. I told myself that there was no need to be angry about something which happened in a dream - and which had never happened in real life - but it still seemed like a minute or so before the anger faded away to a memory.

The nearest waking analogue that I can think of at the moment is anger about something when I am driving, something which happens from time to time. The anger is about something silly and one should not really be angry at all, but it is very real at the time and it would make one sound cross and irritable if one allowed oneself to talk. And I know from experience that the best thing to do is to just wait and let it fade - and usually, after a few minutes, it is as if it had never been.

No doubt an analyst could have some fun with all this.

In the meantime the thought is that anger must be something chemical rather than electrical, a something chemical that once invoked, for whatever reason, true or false, takes a little while to wash away; not like now you see it, now you don't. There might be a switch but it usually takes a bit longer to work than that.

PS: thinking now of the experience sampling of reference 1, I wonder whether I could have timed the fading of the dream anger without disturbing the experience beyond recognition?

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/progress-report-on-descriptive.html.