In Your Dreams, The Untold Story of Your Life
A bad dream is just a dream. Traces of your dreams trail you in your waking life. Shards and shattered pieces of ideas, feelings, memories, reassembled, with seemingly no sense.
Nonsensical happenings. Symbol-strange dreams. Manic chase dreams, where I am the protagonist of my own action movie. Impending dread. Abject fear. Euphoria.
That one where you are naked, or just pantsless, in underwear, about to teach or take a class. The one where you are enrolled in a class and have reached the end of the semester, having missed every class, and you know you are going to fail. Anxious dreams with such obvious meaning as to make them boring. Just wake up and finish that project that is due, already.
Familiar settings. A hotel, somewhere, with a giant lobby, surrounded by stairs. A trail through the woods, that doesn’t seem to go anywhere. Houses and backyards over which I travel, hopping fences, and running , always running. These houses are so specific, it seems unlikely that they don’t exist in the world. I return, every few weeks, and notice a few more details of fences and garages and windows, but I am always outside.
There is a dark basement, somewhere. There is always a dark basement. You probably have one too. What evil looks, what monster awaits, if you descend the stairs?
But sometimes a basement is just a basement.
Certain settings that exist only in my dreams.
There is one that is oddly purple-toned, a shepherd on a hill, tending to a flock. I know this shepherd. This shepherd could be me. It is like a painting done with mostly purple. I can’t tell if I am looking at the shepherd, or looking at the sheep, from the shepherd’s eyes. Point of view is hard to pinpoint, in dreams.
This could be the other story of my life- a fulsome life lived in dreams, and a waking dream that overpowers it, as night turns to day. If this was the true “me”, and that was the true “you”, would we meet in our dreams?
Perhaps we are all linked, on dreamscapes, and free associatively. The collective unconscious happens when we are unconscious. That could be the truest kind of neural network. Freed of our bodies, beings of pure mind, corporeal form taken away.
The “I” which you have worked so hard to create, dissolves, it dissolves as you enter sleep. There is no “I” here. I am there, and you are there, but not “I”. The eye that sees in dreams is not “I”.
On three occasions, my dreams brought ghosts. Ghosts are overrated as monsters. They are just traces of energy, some kind of crossing over. I am not even sure if they were actually the ghosts of dead people, or just ghosts of other people, walking in dreams. It is like walking out of a picture frame, and there is another picture right beside, that you can walk right into.
I’ll show you my dream, if you show me yours. Dream travellers travel. There is no other way to say it. It is difficult to speak of these things in ordinary words.
If dream life was real life, what would that mean? The superior dream consciousness has created a precision simulation for you, complete with friends, feelings, relationships, and a job. Your dream self, which is your true self, has made all this for you. How generous. The free-associative and creative night mind somehow knows how to do that for you, and it’s more real than real. Cut you, you bleed. Hurt you, you cry.
Your waking reality is the part that is not real.
But this world has colours, and your dreams have no colours. You are no action hero in this world. You can’t jump from place to place, as if flying, in this world. Your roving dream eye is an omniscient narrator of its own creation.
I like to think you can learn how to tell those stories. If you can master dream logic, and dream time (or lack thereof), you can weave a dream narrative (but dreams seem to be beyond stories, of any coherence, just fractured mirrors, of which only ever seem to be able to grab a few pieces).
It is possible, of course, that dreams are just the garbage pile of thought. Junk discarded. A program that runs every night to dump out unneeded things. A biological hedge against getting too cluttered, too full. Dreams help to order thoughts. Dreams get rid of old thoughts, unhelpful thoughts, and, like freeform jazz, assemble the notes of our lives in different orders.
This is possible. So why then, do dreams seem so real?
