Saturday, 19 September 2015

On Dreams


Dreaming, like the reason for people's appreciation of music, is one of the deeper mysteries of the human condition. We all dream, several times every night apparently, but it is usually only the dream we are having shortly before we wake that we remember and even then usually only for a few moments. We spend a huge segment of our lives wrapped up in often the most bizarre fantasies and yet this night-time carnival, this nocturnal phantasamagoria, is something which, for the most part, simply evanesces away before we even rise from bed. What purpose does it serve? Why dream?

The study of dreams is known as oneirology. I am no expert on it – although I have read Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and feel I at least have a layman’s understanding of some of the theories about dreaming. I have myself extraordinarily vivid dreams with high frequency. Last night, for instance, I dreamed I was brainstorming ideas with other writers for a sitcom – a fairly uncomplicated and pleasant dream for a change. Usually I have nightmares, either something as simple as an acquaintance’s severed head known floating into my house through the door or extremely dense complex narratives involving zombies and vampires and earthquakes. I take an interest in other people’s dreams and have found that some kinds of dreams are fairly common. Being forced to resit a difficult high school exam is a dream many people have had, as is the dream of making a presentation naked to a crowded room. Dreams of flight are fairly common, a dream Freud interpreted as being about sex (no surprise there). Kurt Cobain apparently used to dream that someone was trying to break into his house and I met a chap recently who had a recurring dream that Tom Jones was stalking around his property trying to find a way in. The commonality of some dreams evinces the universality of human experience.

 A dream of my own… When I was living in Dunedin immediately after leaving school, some fifteen years ago, I dreamt that I was in some American ghetto neighbourhood. Sirens and the presence of fire-trucks indicated that some major disaster or catastrophe had unfolded. A fireman presented a saucer on which floated a fragment, only a fragment, of a face belonging to a close friend of mine. This fragment said, “Andrew- I can’t feel my legs!” The dream was so awful that I decided that I could only be having a nightmare. Remembering, in the dream, that dreamers don’t feel pain, I pinched myself. I felt no pain, knew I was dreaming and forced myself to wake up.

The modern voguish theory of dreaming is that it is the brain’s way of processing, selecting and sorting the day’s memories, transferring salient ones from short-term to long-term storage. I think this theory is bullshit. Although there is apparently some statistical evidence that most dreamers supposedly tend to dream about their experiences of the previous day, my own dreams are far too bizarre to fit this theory at all. Generally my dreams relate to my preoccupations, not to the previous day’s experiences. Freud’s theory of dreaming, by contrast, is that it is fundamentally concerned with wish-fulfilment. Dreams manifest desires that we cannot avow or acknowledge, even to ourselves, and so we conceal them behind metaphors and metonyms, employing compression and displacement to protect the conscious ego from the wild cravings of the subconscious id. I believe Freud is right in suggesting that dreams are coded communications to be deciphered but wrong in suggesting that they are all about repressed desire. Dreams also manifest anxieties and fears – perhaps nightmares sometimes have a cathartic function. We rehearse the worst in sleep so that, when we wake, we are prepared for it. If I dream that a loved one has died, is it reasonable to suppose that I truly secretly want that person dead? In fact, I believe Freud’s theory not only to be wrong but dangerous. If we interpret a nightmare as expressing a repressed desire, it may lead us to a faulty conclusion about who we are.

Another dream of my own… About seven years ago I dreamt that I was in a subterranean chamber. Flickering red firelight played hellishly across the walls. In the room with me sat George W. Bush (then still POTUS) and John Key, the Prime Minister of New Zealand. I was intimidated to be in the same room as them. Bush said to me, “We try to keep our club quite… exclusive.” As I said, being addressed by the American president was something I found quite intimidating, and I remember, in the dream, Key turning to Bush as if to say, “See? I’m not the only one intimidated.” I left the chamber and, in an antechamber, found myself in a circle with Nicholas Cage, Tim Robbins and a third, a slight shadowy figure that I couldn’t identify. They gave me a communion wafer which I put in my mouth – immediately I felt as though I had been stuck in the mouth by a lightning bolt. Tim Robbins said to me, “How do you like that acid?”

The ancient Greeks apparently believed that dreams were messages from the Gods or from dead relatives. Flaky hippies often espouse the idea that dreams are a form of astral travel. Perhaps dreams can foretell the future as well as refer to the past. For example, in the dream I just described, I believe that the shadowy figure was Jon Stewart, someone I didn’t and couldn’t identify at the time because I dreamt the dream before the Daily Show had even started screening in New Zealand, but someone who was to become extremely important to me later in life (for reasons too bizarre to explain in this blog.) I have had dreams that foreshadowed future events and other dreams that were almost revelatory. Dreams do not just tell us about ourselves; they tell us about the world we are living in. Perhaps, in sleep, we are plugged into the universal unconscious and, in sleep, we lose ourselves in the world-soul.

I wish I could offer a good theory of dreams.  I feel I have worked out a good theory of narrative and even a partial theory of music but a good theory of dreams eludes me. Perhaps there is no single theory that explains dreams – some dreams are explained best by Freudian psychoanlysis, others by modern neurocognitive approaches, others by more mystical interpretations. Perhaps the error we make is in looking for a single catchall explanation. Perhaps, perhaps not, perhaps… But it is both important and therapeutic to make the enquiry.

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