J-zine - Dreams

Dreams

We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep

Tempest, Act IV.

Dreams have fascinated people far back into the misty and unwritten past. The very chaos and confusion of dreams makes them enigmatic and yet we constantly seek to find the meaning -- or should I write a meaning -- in the madness that inhabits the twighlight of our conciousness.

Dreams proper are part of our sleep -- day dreams are another thing again; they are not what I am writing about here. Because we dream in our sleep, our recollection of dreams is generally weak and imperfect. Only occasionaly do we have a big dream; one that sticks in out mind; one that has some Freudian or Jungian theme to it. Some are sweet and some are scary, though it seems that we remember the scary ones better.

Some dreams seem to be triggered by the actual situation of the dreamer. I dreamed I saw a flock of geese in the car park -- the (bamboo) scaffolding outside the bedroom window produced a sound uncannily like a goose honking when it swayed in the wind. A woman once confided to me that she dreamed she was having difficulty relieving herself -- every time she tried, she felt a burning sensation. When she woke she found that she had actually made her panties wet. On one occasion I dreamed that I was asleep and couldn't wake up, however hard I tried -- that was really scary!

Freud was deeply concerned why dreams seem to be nonsensical. On reflection we might wonder why there should be any pattern at all. One way of looking at it is that what we recollect and call dreams are the ripples on the surface that dimly show the pattern at the bottom of the river. Only gross features are readable -- the rest is noise. Human nature is such that we want to read something out of the jumble of symbols and themes. Aristotle wrote Now dreams must be either be causes or signs of events which occur, or else coincidences; either, all or some of these, or one only. Can we reconstruct the generating causes from dreams?

Sigmund Freud, for one, thought so. In his Interpretation of Dreams (1900) he suggest that dreams represent a thought or wish. The thought or wish is expressed though symbols; parents may be represented by royalty, your brothers and sisters as small animals; jewels may symbolise a loved one. And, of course, Freud found countless sexual symbols; peaches and fruit in general represent the female breast, while snakes and other reptiles are are male sexual symbols. How much of this rich symbolic vocabulary is genuine and how much is the fertile imagination of Freud himself is a question that has been debated endlessly.

Carl Gustav Jung also found symbols in dreams, but his interpretations of symbolism broke away from Freud's and turned in a totally new direction. Jung saw universal Archetypes and spoke about the Collective Unconcious, a term that is easy to misunderstand. He studied myths and legends from many ancient and modern cultures. He felt that the archetypes he found there were as innate to man as the impulse to build a nest is to a bird or to form colonies is for ants. They were, in modern terms, hard wired. Jung underplayed the rôle of cultural exchange and common linguistic heritage.

Thus, students of Freud will find Freudian symbols in a dream and students of Jung will find Jungian archetypes. Dreams turn out to be a tantalising window into the mind, but alas a dim, distorting window. They are ink-blot tests for the dream analysts. An oportunity for the interpreter to colour the blurred and fuzzy outlines with his or her own preconceptions. If I dream about a paint brush should I read it as a male sexual symbol or reminder by my unconcious that the paint on the bedroom wall is shabby? You tell me.

Conscious Thinking

Dreams

I dreamed that I was sleeping. I wasn't in my own bed, but on some big couch or sofa I think. Now the problem was that I couldn't wake up, however hard I tried. It felt like some heavy weight on my body. Or maybe it was sleep itself that felt heavy. The more I struggled to wake up, the heavier it felt. When I finally woke up, I felt very relieved.

An Ancient Dream

I dreamed I entered a house where none leave that enter it; where people sit in darkness; dust is their fare and clay their food. They are clothed like birds with feathers for covering, they see no light, they reside in the darkness.
...
There was Ereshkigal, the queen of the underworld; and Belit Seri squatted on the floor in front of her; she who is the recorder of the gods and keeps the book of death. She held a tablet from which she read. She raised her head, she saw me and spoke: Who has brought this one here? Then I awoke like a man drained of blood, like one who has been taken by the bailiffs and whose heart pounds wiith terror.
(Enkidu's dream -- from the Epic of Gilgamesh)