THE STUFF OF DREAMS
“You were like a dream,
I wish I hadn’t slept through.
Within it I fell deeper,
Than your heart would care to let you”- Lang Leav
“I have a dream that one day every valley shall
be exhaled, every hill and mountain shall be low, the rough places will be made
straight and the glory of the lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see
it.” These are the notoriously celebrated words spoken with full justice only
by Martin Luther King JR; The American pastor, activist, humanitarian, leader
of the African-American civil rights movement and a dreamer. Everyone’s dreams
are individual to their own mind and it’s how you interpret them that matters.
With so much of our time devoted to dreaming, it
is not surprising that speakers, writers, scientists, philosophers, doctors and
poets, have all endlessly applied themselves to the vast exploration of this
fascinating, yet also undeniably dark side of human existence.
Scientifically speaking, dreams are a series of
chemically induced 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. “The
royal road” supposedly being a metaphor, used by doctors of the imaginative
sort, for the journey of exhilarating twists and electrifying turns that reveal
unconscious thoughts, feelings and perceptions of reality you never knew you
possessed. 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 unconscious
longing for an illicit love affair or some scandalous thoughts. But, this is
not scientifically proven. Dream analysis is only a personal interpretation
based on gathered facts and statistics of a wide audience.
If dreams are the ‘Royal Road to the
Unconscious’ then the route that we’re taking when we dream may not always be deemed
as positive. When we dream we may be met by the deadliest highways 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 (otherwise known as DMT). 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.
I’m almost certain, that the majority of
individuals would prefer not to actively participate in dreaming more than the
given norm. And the past child in us all has had more than their fair share of
obscure and temporarily mentally damaging dreams to last us an entire life
time. I don’t dream, not the way I used to. Which I suppose is a part of
getting older, isn’t it? Eventually, we’re all expected to linger aimlessly in
retirement homes, singing old songs and staring as our televisions scream a
white noise crackle. I used to think this was to do with the ticking biological
clock, but I now realise it’s to do with our minds. As I look for dreams, I
find myself dreaming less and less. But this dreaming, does it really have a
meaning or is it just a desperate cling-on to escapism? There you are, trapped
in a job you might hate, a tiny town with surrounding walls or perhaps, it’s
the unemployment that stifles? The fact is, maybe you just don’t fit? So you
make your own work unconsciously. You may daydream of the job you desire or
dream about new fears, an appreciated unaccustomed effort, an added something
extra- whether you do this asleep or awake- it is now part of your personality-
and the dream you open and walk towards takes you apart from your greyish life-
into a coloured one. It is, at the moment, a fantasy, but dreaming keeps your
mind alive.
Sadly, dreams are often passed off as a simple one
night occurrence or an unreachable aspiration, 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.
