lickhaven

I’m fascinated by dreams, not in a Freudian sense (I haven’t read his works on dreams), but how they’re put together, the elements that make them up and where they come form, the choices we make in their construction, what varied uses they may have. They make connections you can’t find while awake and draw together conclusions we seldom make consciously. Even when they’re ugly or terrifying, they’re beautiful.

All sorts of explanations have been floated, but nobody really knows why we have dreams.

One fairly recent “theory,” kind of mind-tingling, is that the brain is always tossing bits and pieces back and forth between its reasoning and emotive centers. In that view, dreams are the underlying give and take between the two, with waking life also being a form of dream, but constrained by reality: Dreams, then, are our basic state; being wake is an interfering nuisance.

Earlier on, the underlying concept of “meaning,” in the sense of “purpose creating content,” was central to Jung’s view of life: There had to be reason behind experience, and that reason had to spring from compelling need, in a metaphysical sense. His own dreams, those he recounts, are filled with symbolism and elements that obviously carry meaning – even when the specific meaning remains cloudy. 

One of my favorite explanations for dreams came out during the 1970-80s: they serve as a cataloguing mechanism for memory. All the muddle and effluvia that churns at night is elements of daily experience searching for their niches. Seems reasonable: When I’ve tracked down individual incidents or elements in a particular dream, no matter how weird, I’ve almost always been able to pin them to a specific, often obscure, image from my last day or two: Aha! That’s the thing that was sticking to the bottom of my shoe when I was crossing the street. 

What I’d really like to think is that dreams are the mind playing games, trying to escape or reject the expected. All day we pretend that what we’re doing makes sense, has some end in sight or a value of its own. At night, we plop down on the pillow and our unconscious snickers, “Oh, you think so? Well here’s what it’s really like”: wallop, whack, 3 Stooges, Laurel and Hardy.

But I also wonder if different people don’t have different types of dreams that serve wholly different functions. Listen to anyone ramble on about their dreams. They nearly always reflect that individual’s way of skewing the world. Some sound Freudian, some Jungian, some cataloging, some a chaotic jumble, some searingly realistic. Not being mental clones, we may not all live in the same universe of dreams.

I’m not a “meaning” person, for instance. I don’t find deep meaning behind life, and I think wasting time looking for it gets in the way of clear, rational examination. I’m fact-based, intensely interested in science and physical law, though I don’t expect it to lead to an explanation of ultimate causality.

So maybe my dreams and Jung’s serve wholly different functions. Jung’s, I think, laid down a road leading to a level of personal reality beneath or beyond what he could access in daily life. Most importantly, they reinforced his need for enshrining “meaning” as the pillar upholding human existence.

Mine, I’m pretty sure, have most often served as a way to escape reality. For years, most of my dreams had no emotional content – none of the fear that nipped at my waking heels. They were, in the best sense, a rest, a curative. 

I’ve also developed a theory that I haven’t run across elsewhere about disordered dream endings. Most often, getting lost in a dream is looked at as reflecting the dreamer’s feeling “lost” in daily life; I think that’s often the case. But time and again, I’ve had dreams appear to drift off their own internal path. Yes, there are a lot of varied ideas about the function of dreams, but I think it’s possible that within a dream the function itself, whatever it may be, can go astray: The dream fucks up, and the dreamer is kicked out of the resulting ineffective mess. 

Similarly, there’s this, which I’ve experienced but also not seen referred to: a “wrong” element intrudes into a dream and derails it: My dream’s moving along nicely, even if it follows no waking logic. Then suddenly my overseeing mind recognizes something that just doesn’t fit in. The sweep, the stream, the evolution of the dream comes a-cropper. When this happens, I usually wake up; the dream, thrown off track, can’t continue.

So, what happened? Did my memory-cataloger toss a wandering snippet into the wrong pigeonhole? Did my mind, cooking up a spicy dish in the wok of irrationality, apply the wrong logic-seasoning, like tossing ice cream into a stir fry? Maybe it was a dollop of “meaning” dropped into a “cataloguing” dream, or a day’s trivial memory trying to shoulder aside an archetype.

And maybe our categories of dreams change with the progress of life? Here’s what I recall over the broad swipe of time:

1) Around the age of five I had a recurrent series of dreams in which I was chased by a wolf who drove a hone-delivery milk truck with a screen door across the front where the engine should be. He would stop the truck, unhook the screen door and chase me. I couldn’t make my legs move beyond a drag-through-the-mush pace (reflecting physical paralysis in REM sleep, as I later found out), but he never caught me. I was, at most, mildly scared, never expecting anything really bad to happen.

What category would embrace this dream? Damned if I know.

2) For 30 or more years as an adult, 80-90% of my dreams were emotionless, usually bland mystery stories where I was a participant following paths and clues without involvement. I’d guess these were a relaxing form of escapism at a time when waking life was a pain in the ass.

3) In recent years, my dreams often involve urban settings (for some reason, or none at all, this focus became stronger after moving to our rural home). I’m nearly always lost somewhere in Philly, going through an area I should know but can’t navigate, to reach somewhere else that may or may not be definite. If I’m walking, the streets approach each other at odd angles, and trolley tracks traverse them where I know they shouldn’t. City Hall looms in the center of a linear tangle I can’t comprehend. I enter a subway station through constricted passageways filled with construction apparatus. I weave back and forth through corridors and stairways that meander up, down, around, under, within, entering buildings that I have to wend my way through – usually a restaurant at some point – either finding no way out or finally getting outside to realize I’m not where I wanted to go.

I also have a heavy emphasis on urban transportation – trolleys, the subway with its mazes of concourses, tight places to crawl through to get to a vehicle, missing the train, getting on the wrong one, not knowing where it’s going, the 30th St. train station transformed into myriad offices and shops.

Some dreams are filled with color and sweep and succulent, unlikely architecture. Even the most muddled or chaotic are stuffed with detail and mounded effluvia. Interiors, entered into like personalized trails, exude ancient trivia in narrow, littered exit hallways that shed deteriorating wainscoting packed solid with local memory.

Roadways (so many roadways, so often) are lined with every variety of house and junkyard, every imaginable frontage. Their geometry of line and curve – seen as though from a tower – spills out into a cityscape that harries itself through unidentified ages.

Other common themes of recent years: house renovation (multiple small rooms, intricately and confusingly arranged), leaking water — pipes, roofs, basements, rivers.

4) I seldom used to dream about people I knew. Now many of my dreams involve the family, people from Philly, and others from years ago that I hardly ever consciously think about. I’m often a peripheral or incomplete character – a helper or observer without fixed identity. The details are fuzzy and have little tactile quality, as through viewed and felt through a badly formed lens.

My only true nightmares were attacks on the basic level of my functioning mind. While a freshman in college, I dreamed that I was in a symbolic logic class where something grasped, strangled, shackled – christ, I still can’t come close to putting it into words – my ability… not to think, not to will to think, not even to want to will to think, but something so basic to existence that without it I would not be a working being. It created an imprisonment so fearful that I awoke in paralyzed horror. Then I fell asleep… and dreamed the same again. And awoke paralyzed and dreamed the same. And again, at least five times. If there’s ever a terror mechanism that mindfuckers could put together to force me to confess blindly, squealingly to plotting human annihilation… 

Many people apparently dream in extended-reality format. They relive, re-devise or extend their waking lives. I don’t recall half a dozen realistic dreams in my life. The elements in mine make little or no waking sense, show no logical connection; they larrup and trip over each other, crisscross, overlap, leapfrog, evaporate, oscillate, regroup, dissipate, intertwine, horseride, blend and crystalize, smear. They partake of everything and nothing.

Some hang by their dreamertips from their own cliffs of understanding, near to memory but unassailable. Many have a distinct “flavor,” a specific yet indefinable sense that if I can reach… out… along the track of what’s left at waking… if I can grasp that one blurred image by the ankle and pull its whole body back… there it is! Instead, I fall back asleep, wake half an hour later, all of it gone.

Why don’t we remember some dreams? Is it because we can’t remember them, that dream “logic” is so unlike waking logic that our mind, once awake, can’t grasp it?

Have you ever had a hypnogogic state (smattered flashes while on the verge of falling asleep) in which you’re assaulted by an immediate, pressing need to do something vitally important or to correct an overwhelming mistake, only to realize, thirty seconds later, that there is no such need or mistake, or even a realm in which such a possibility could live? I doubt it means squat, but it hints at a way of looking at the world that’s certainly non-Aristotelian.

We were visiting one of Linda’s nieces who let us into the psychic side of the family through one of her predictive dreams. For years she’d dreamed that she was driving and suddenly hit a kid in a striped shirt, flipped him up, killed him. One day she was out driving to college with her father, got the feeling “this is it” and braked suddenly. Her father asked why; the living kid in the striped shirt had darted into the street. (I have no idea what to make of this, because I don’t think time is a landscape, but rather an artifact of motion and entropy; there’s no fore-knowledge of the future.)

To sum up, as I see it, each of us develops the dream structure that fits our specific mental organization and personality; it’s not a matter of interpretation, but of worldview, of how we each envision what a dream should be and do in terms of our needs and desires. Our necessity creates our dreams, and our dreams then help create us, in a constantly evolving helix.

[I plan to drop in the occasional personal dream as I putter along. They will follow no chronological order. Some may be tied to the accompanying rumin in some skewed way, others will just be there to be there. Feel free to ignore them.]