It was in vivid high definition: some monster person with a melting face and a knife and doors that I could not lock fast enough. There was chasing and close calls. The stuff of horror movies I do not go see, under any circumstance, and yet can somehow recreate at a cellular level. I jarred awake and did what any sensible, freaked out person does. I nudged my husband. “MB, wake up, I’m having a nightmare.” He did not wake up. “Wake up!” He snored away. Then I realized how scary his snoring was. And the pug’s snoring. Melting guy was out there lurking in the noise and darkness of the room, the house, the universe. My heart raced. I was constructing more narrative than I could handle.
They say it is just randomly firing neurons. We impose a story using disconnected fragments of thought the same way we might arrange our Halloween candy by type or wrapper color before we eat it. There are hundreds of different theories, most discount Freud and his interpretations as silly. Dreams are no longer considered demon portents of the Unconscious. They offer no more insight than a scatter of mental fifty-two pick-up. Yet, I miss the days when flying on a horse holding a sword meant something. Every morning might be an opportunity to catalogue psychedelic symbols and increase self-awareness. But the covers are pulled off such ideas, I am left shivering with fright and interrupted REM sleep, ruing my decision to watch the season finale of Law and Order SVU and read a review of Sam Raimi’s Dragged to Hell on the same night. Both of these influences, mixed with frustration over broken locks on my car, filled my brain with scenes of mayhem and dread. Without textbook psychoanalysis, there is no thesis for my melting guy except poor TV choices.
In high school I dreamed that I was in the doctor’s office and he was telling me I was pregnant. I would say, “But I can’t be, I can’t be, I can’t be.” As a young mother I had nightmares about forgetting the baby all over the city. As a fledgling career woman I dreamed that I could get so angry I would blow people’s hair back when I yelled at them. Recently I dreamed that the ceiling, walls and furniture of our house were falling down around me. The significance of such memories should be obvious. It would seem logical that I was working through prevalent fears and prohibitions pushed from day into night. Science might contradict, positing that as my mind transitioned from sleep to waking, I sorted as I moved through the collected evidence from the day, editing so that only images sticky with current relevance made it through to consciousness. We are apparently not processing issues as much as viewing a collage of instant replays, some real, some invented, some reflected from media and the person standing next to us on the train.
I remember the first bad dream that I defined as a bad dream. Superman was attacked by giant trees and they were hurting him. That’s it, but it was trauma enough to make me afraid to go to sleep at night. I devised an elaborate bedtime ritual. The minute the lights went out I imagined two old fashioned movie projectors in my head, one manned by a devil and one manned by an angel. The devil movies were films of under-the-bed-bump-in-the-night-creepy things. The angel movies were Fern and Wilbur the pig, my birthday party, my favorite cartoons and stuffed animals. I would concentrate very hard on the angel projector to only show happy pictures in my head. This also worked post bad dream to demand that the devil stop playing his movies and turn off his projector. This strategy more or less took me through grade school.
On the grown-up nightmare night, I curled up next to my inert husband and tried to push the monster from my immediate memory. I thought of the latest quilt I am planning or characters from a novel I love. My angel projector kicked in, assuming to control the experience before I fell back to sleep, willing a positive destiny for my imagination. It is the flip side to what our minds seem to do after sleep, as in my everyday life gone wrong dreams, selecting what we most fear or debate, forcing the worst to surface as we sift and move on. We compulsively attempt to frame our unconscious life, not satisfied with complete coincidence. Every flash of movement, image or sound gathered throughout the day is tinder for these neurological fireworks, sparks of colorful nonsense that we see, even in terror, as metronomic flowers of infinite meaning.
PB, what a great post! I don’t know why there are no comments. Dreams are actually a very powerful tool. It’s a lot to talk about. I’ll post my comment a bit later about some of the dreams you are having. I am just curious why nobody dreams on TGW.
I think dreams are meaningful at the least because we make them meaningful. I had one particularly intense dream when I was about 13 years old that led, at different points of my life, to my deciding to oppose the death penalty and to my leaving the Mormon church. I brought it up with my therapist a few weeks ago and it’s now part of further changes.
I also once had a dream in which I was pregnant. Terrifying, that one was.
When I was a kid, a lot of the things going on around me were very confusing. I did not have the mental capacity and the experience of the adults to understand everything. I noticed that I was having dreams, which gave me the insight into the daily evens as well as sets of actions and behaviors I was to implement to succeed. All of that might sound really weird and not scientific, but it works.
When I met my best friend, in 3d grade, she shyly conveyed her oneiric experiences to me thinking that I would deem it strange. She was using her dreams for navigation in the physical world as I used mine. As time went by, we found out that we could communicate with each other through our dreams. We wanted to experiment with this, so we agreed to not discuss our dreams for a while and started dream journals. After exchanging our journals, we were shocked to discover that our communication was real and not only had we worked together on various issues, but we could connect to other people, who played important roles in each other’s lives. It gave us an opportunity to interpret the answers from the 3d party’s point of view. It was crazy. We’ve been inseparable for many years now. Our dreams are so much in tune that she often calls me to inform me of some emotions and ideas she picked up from my dreams and I did not. We also learned that we could connect to other people and speak to them through dreams. We understood the purpose of a de ju vu.
PB, dreams communicate messages to us in symbols. Each of us has a set of symbols, which decodes meanings according to our personal experiences, believes, etc. When we tune into the waves of other people’s brains, we can transmit their feelings, thoughts, and ask them questions and receive their symbols. Since I don’t know you well enough to know your set of symbols, it would be difficult for me to interpret the exact meaning of your dream, however, I can try to briefly analyze it. You probably watch people and evaluate them based on their speech, body language, and actions. You find this cognitive ability to be one of your biggest strengths. When you evaluate a person or a situation, you draw conclusions based on your assessment and feel fairly comfortable with how you should act and what you should do. When you can’t see the guy’s face in the dream, you can’t analyze, compartmentalize, and explain to yourself what you should do with this situation. Since you can’t see his expression and what he is thinking, you do not feel safe. It means that there is a situation in your life, which might arise or is already happening, which you do not know how to deal with using your conventional way of handling things, you are afraid of the unknown, or concerned that something might come up that you would not know how to manage and will not be able to “lock your door” in time. You need to figure out what it is that’s bothering you. Home usually represents the safest place, yourself, and family. When the walls and ceilings start falling down, it means you are not sure of yourself, you think that suddenly you will encounter the unfamiliar and will not have the mental gear to come to grips with it.
Dave, being pregnant means fertility or good ideas. It was probably about something new you were thinking about doing and the solution on how to approach it. It could also mean that you were confronting yourself about mothering, being overprotective, or controlling towards someone. Again, it’s just a rough interpretation, since I don’t know the actual situation and the time of your life, when this dream took place.
Natasha, Wow. that is a pretty incredible interpretation.
For all of my reading on the neurobiology of the brain, which strips dreamstates down to machine static, it is this sort of conversation that keeps the topic compelling to me. I appreciate your taking the time to write about this for me – honestly it rings true enough to consider.
MB asked if I wanted to go see that Hell movie tonight (98% on rotten tomatoes) – I was like, um, no. I am undone by the poster. Clearly I need to visit my own issues before the theater.
Has anyone ever had a dream that didn’t seem to be their own? Where the experiences in the dream seemed to be rooted in some other life? The most vivid dream of my life was like this. I had written a screen play about black slave owners in antebellum South, and for some reason I was explaining it to Gary Trudeau, who told me script would flop, because there were no black slave owners in the South. This was a couple of years before Edward P. Jones had finished his novel The Known World, about this very subject. But the script for this story emerged as a whole thing, not a vague recollection of a plot, but a whole story with major and minor characters and a complex story arc. When I woke up I felt compelled to research the subject of black slave owners, and sure enough, found out that my story could work. To this day I have this feeling like I have been entrusted with someone’s dream, and I am supposed to share it, or do something with it. The story is good.
Yes, Rogan, it is possible to dream other people’s dreams and experience their emotions, thoughts, and cognitive processes first hand and from their P.O.V. It is also possible to tune into thoughts and dreams that have been thought and dreamed a long time ago. I found a very interesting interpretation of this in mythology. Remember Pan? Pan represented the concept of unity: “We are all one.” Our brains act like antennas, which can tune into different frequencies and decode the universal data for us to understand. We all contribute to the same database and all draw upon it. Once a dream or a thought is emitted by the brain, it becomes the property of the Universe (some people call it the Spirit of Akasha, the source of all knowledge, a database of all intelligence). Even if a dream took place hundreds of years ago, your brain can tune into it and pick it up (provided that you are searching for this information.) It’s kind of like googling the Universe. What you experienced might have also been a real life story actually lived in the past, present, or in the future. Well, probably it the past considering the nature of your script. Most importantly, whenever you wake up in the morning and have the craziest idea, which will go against any common sense, but seems complete and makes perfect sense, you should never ever be suppress it. It is a gift to you from yourself. As you act upon it, you will find that it is the absolutely right thing to do.
Sorry, “you should never ever suppress it” No “be”