April 18th, 2005
I don't keep track of my dreams through a dream-log or journal or whatever. I occasionally have some dreams that are so loud and vivid that I will never forget them for as long as I live, but the ones I don't remember are almost definitely nothing but noise. I am certain of that.
Furthermore, I am certain that nobody is particularly interested in reading an account of my dreams ... I mean, think about it: Why would someone be interested in anyone else? The truth is: Nobody except our mothers cares about us and our plight. You might get some fleeting interest from friends, family members, or spouses; but, for the most part we are on our own. And it is only the infantile that think the small personal details that go into their lives are even slightly interesting to strangers. [He wrote into his public blog, pausing to make sure to post it to his personal website under the right filename so everyone can read it.]
So where was I? Oh yes: Dreams. We humans are fascinated with our dreams in the same way that a long-time owner of a car suddenly discovers a knob or lever under the dashboard. Or in the same way that we crane our necks to look over the doctor's shoulder at an X-ray of some part of our body. We want to see something about ourselves that we don't already know. And just like the murky blur on the X-ray that is meaningless to our eyes, or the fact that the newly-discovered knob is just a air-vent, we are ultimately disappointed in what we can glean from our dreams.
See, apart from the fact that everything is subject to wide-awake interpretation, there is nothing in the "backs of our heads" that we could not determine while sitting wide awake without the TV, radio, computer, or book to distract us, and just thinking about things. And dreams are hardly an effective shortcut to divining what's "really going on" anyhow; they are filled with extraneous and occasionally artful noise with just a few threads of real-time woven around that.
In this respect I liken dreams to myth. For just as myths are a clever weaving of so-called fact with fictive but cleverly-fitting details, dreams are the same kind of distillation of notable events of the past day, worries or fears, and random images that we are in the process of itemizing for long-term memory storage. All of that may be additionally sprinkled with new realisations that, as adults, we still sometimes have (though not nearly as commonly as when we were children).
For those -er- purists who insist that plumbing the depths of our dreams for real-world meaning dooms us forever to be Jack the Dull Boy, I respond that I'm not proposing anybody does that. But if you want to use dreams as nothing but metaphorically-imbued miniature works of art, go right ahead—though don't forget you are on a cul-de-sac; the mind is the most temporary of canvases, and if you try to manipulate what you experience in your dreams into a real-world representation in some art form (film or video is probably the most common), you are now trying to literalize ... which means you are back into the interpretation game again. After all, there are wires and pulleys behind all the greatest works of art; the secret is how well you conceal them, eh?
I guess what this all boils down to is that we are determined to find out what the reason for dreaming is. There must be some purpose to dreaming, mustn't there? Well, humans seem to have reasons (good or bad) that aren't immediately obvious for doing all kinds of physical/physiological things: Sneezing, crying, dancing, yawning, sleeping ... and dreaming.
The problem lies in the fact that when the reason for something is unclear or ambiguous (or just complicated), there is an element in us—all of us—that looks for an other-worldly (including scientific) answer, an answer for those times when we lack courage and strength to face this horrible world full of horrible people and horrible things. We want something wonderful to counter those times when we think to ourselves, "There must be something better than this dreadful existence." And dreams seem to come ready made to answer just that need. They seem to be the deliverance from something that is bigger than all of us and ready to consume us.
Because we can attach these meanings, these purposes to dreams ... and because we can live out ephemeral lives at night through our dreams, we can continue to fight through the dreadful day. Maybe that is the purpose of dreams.
Sign my guestbook - Email me - Back to the Rant-o-Rama index