On Dreams

Dreams are peculiar. While we are unconscious, our minds assemble loose narratives from lived experience that we take for granted as legitimately happening in real time. This is weird. We can see dead friends, be subjected to horrors, see the world’s end, defy laws of physics, lose our teeth (a widespread and highly recurrent cultural dream), all while our eyes dart to and fro behind closed lids. Stranger still is the fact that these things we see are never as they are in reality. “I was in my living room, but it wasn’t my living room…” we recount to each other, and we know exactly what is meant.

What accounts for this strangeness?

It seems to me that dreams reverse the flow of cause and effect in relation to experience and perception. I think this is what dream are for: to bear a physical representation of hidden emotional realities.

We have emotional responses to the experiences life presents to us. Drinking hot chocolate on a snowy day, a near death experience, the awkward exploration of a first kiss, all are experiences interpreted by our brains which elicit an emotional response. My emotions are reflective of the experience and reproduce a psychic representation of it. Life is the instigator, my emotions the responder. Visually, I experience cold hard reality while my emotions remain “invisible”, if you will.

Dreams are the opposite. When we dream, our minds take an emotional reality and give it a visual backdrop for the emotion to be played out; they are the theatre for the subconscious. In dreams, emotion is the cold, hard reality, and the mind applies images to create a bespoke representation of it, pulling on stage the background, props and actors that give the emotion a visual analog. Emotions instigate and images respond.

I may dream of fire lit hellscapes and apocalyptic visions, a terrifying image if I were to paint a picture. But if the emotion attached is one of adventure and strength, I wake refreshed. Or I may have a dream that is visually benign, but the feelings about the scene are so horrifying I wake slick with sweat. In dreams, the inky dark of the subconscious are used to paint a scenario so we can see what is hidden to the eyes in the waking world.

Example from a dream two nights old:

I was driving towards nowhere in particular in an old Chevy truck at night on some county road. There was a sense of escape to the drive. Within the cab, there was a presiding sense of security and calm. Next to me on the bench seat was a friend’s 16 year old daughter, and next to her, by the window, my 15 year old son, maybe a few years older, alert and still, staring ahead into the gloom. The locus of security was my son. She laid her head on his broad left shoulder and slept. Dashboard lights glowed blue on her cheeks and brow. Her eyes were closed in peace, as though the answer to dark world beyond the headlights had been solved on the shoulder to her right. I drove on.

Interpretation of scene:

The emotional reality which the dream formed itself around is that I have a confidence in my son as he enters manhood, that he is a protector with an indefatigable resolution. I am proud of him and how he shoulders sacrificial responsibility over those in his trust. The confidence in this strength was represented by the close family friend resting on his shoulder which was contrasted by the looming sense of escaping some tragedy behind and darkness ahead. The old model of the truck was the godly manhood, the older and stouter model of manhood. That I was still driving represents my current fatherly responsibility (he is not a man yet), though the observational feeling of the dream means he is nearly there.

The beauty of dreams is we may never have put into words these emotions until the mind films a scene which gave them a visual representation. In a sense a dream can bring emotional resolution by verifying to the the eyes the settled reality of the unseen. Perhaps some dreams are the brain tossing out random bits of memory and making a meal out of it, like dinner on leftover night. But those dreams that never seem to dry out even far into the midday may be worth pondering what emotional reality we are meant to understand.