THE STUFF OF DREAMS (FIRST DRAFT)

Dreams are a series of images, emotions, ideas and perceptions that occur involuntarily in the unconscious mind during sleep. The purpose and content of dreaming has never been definitively understood, though they have been a subject of psychological and scientific speculation, as well as a subject of philosophical and religious interest at the time of discovery and discussion of dreams and dreaming throughout history. They have been described as ‘the royal road to the unconscious by Sigmund Freud, a doctor in the nineteen hundreds. This may not be an occurring fact when you wake from a dream that involves you participating in sporting events, stark naked with your ex-lover. However, the interpretations of these kinds of dreams are a specialist interest for psychoanalysts who believe that all dreams have a hidden meaning. Some may say that your previous partner being over exposed with you means that you can see right through them and their intentions. It may also foretell an illicit love affair or some scandalous activity. But, this is not scientifically proven. Dream analysis is only a personal interpretation based on gathered facts and statistics of a wide audience. Everyone’s dreams are individual to their own mind and it’s how you interpret them that matters. You may never think about the dream again.

If dreams are the ‘Royal Road to the Unconscious’ then the route that we’re taking when we dream may be the deadliest highway of horrendous twists and turns leaving us heavily sweating and struggling to breathe. Or, they may be mysterious, bewildering and more often then you may assume: eye opening.

The history of dreaming dates back to the BC era, when ancient Greeks and The Egyptians were the leading force in teaching and education of subjects that nobody had explored before. The Egyptians analysed the main meaning behind dreams and the Greeks interpreted these theories into their own culture. Aristotle famously wrote: “A person awakes from sleep when digestion is complete”. - This is evidently not true, however many of us wake from sleep or dreaming when the worst possible scenario is about to occur. Psychoanalysts believe this is an unconscious decision made by our brain or our ‘Super Ego’ to stop us damaging our other unconscious processes. In other words; our brain stops us from dreaming any further if the mental images we’re creating would do damage to us emotionally or physically.

Despite the possibility of our mind emotionally damaging us through the form of mental images, some people enjoy dreaming so much that they participate in taking an extremely potent, illegal hallucinogenic drug called Dimethyltryptamine (Dime-Thigh-l-tripe-tamine). This drug is an isolated and synthetic form of the similar chemical formed in our brains when we dream. It allows the individual to continue dreaming throughout the day without their brain waking up with unconscious decision.

 Personally, the thought of dreaming more than the norm is not something I would like to actively participate in. I’ve had more than my fair share of obscure and temporarily mentally damaging dreams to last me an entire life time. Dreams are often passed off as a simple one night occurrence. Never to be seen again unless the wandering, sluggish mind accidently bumps into its old friend on a cold lonely night- the reoccurring dream, and what do you need more on a cold lonely night than to relive terrible memories that you swore you’d never revisit… But, one of the best ways to fully appreciate the strange fluidity of this unconscious state of mind is to remember the beautiful rarity of this hallucinogenic cinema of imagery that parades around your thoughts throughout the night. Picking up on things that your eyes had seen in the daytime but had passed off as something that needn’t be stored in the already crowded brain.  When you wake from a dream it’s easy to forget the unnatural bombardment of thoughts that travel through your head. Forgetting how easy it is for your brain to turn a park bench into a fully-fledged sleigh as you ride through the night in a land you’ve never been before. Dreaming truly is the land of the bizarre.