by Kevin Fournier - December 12, 2007
J. says that in a dream, every person represents some part of yourself, rather than the people whom they appear to be – but she’s an Ass.
The book that C. once gave me, the “Dictionary of Dreams,” where you’re supposed to look up the various objects and figures and incidents in your dreams, and it gives you a meaning for each, what they symbolize. I would never say that C. is an ass, but whoever wrote that book sure is.
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I have read (in H. Bloom?) that some psychologists now believe that dreams are the mind’s way of using up, and thereby getting rid of, superfluous and otherwise unusable fragments of information and emotion; that is why dreams are such a hodge-podge of heterogeneous imagery and incongruous moods; above all, that is why we forget our dreams so readily: because that’s what we’re meant to do. Which may be a little bit true, but not true enough, so screw ’em.
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To understand something, and to be able to put it into words, are not even remotely synonymous.
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Speaking of dreams and the species of dreams. For example, cheese-dreams, dreams caused by bad digestion. Like that dream I had once, when I was a kid, of being chased by the teenaged counter-boy from Chicken Delight, with a plastic knife; it sounds silly to tell about it, but it seemed very terrifying at the time – an excellent example of the dissonance between what happens in a dream, and how you feel while you are dreaming it. And remember Coleridge and the sphinx. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
So – dreams & the species of dreams. There are cheese-dreams. There are silly-dreams, of a mind just purely at play, and crossed-wire dreams, when the mind inadvertently combines two unconnected things, and you have the uncomfortable experience of, say, getting sexually aroused by your coffee table.
There are ex-girlfriend-dreams, that nag at you for some wrong you’ve committed and are trying not to think about, some doubt you have and are trying to ignore, some realization you’d rather not come to – basically, dreams that confront you with some unpleasant fact that, during your waking day, you have worked to keep out of your conscious mind.
There are broken-dreams, when some external and physical phenomenon, around you as you sleep, breaks into your dream – eg, your telephone rings, but rather than wake up to answer it, in your dream the school-bell rings to signal recess (even though you probably weren’t in school at all, up to that point in your dream; but whoever it is inside you who’s responsible for dreams, clearly agrees with Emerson, that Consistency is the Hobgoblin of Little Minds). And by extrapolation (by inference?) perhaps the same may be true of psychic phenomena, breaking into our dreams; eg, say I live in an apartment building, and my neighbors are all strangers to me; and perhaps one of my neighbors is deeply depressed, and spends his nights insomniac, drunk and quietly crying; of which I am totally unaware, but my sleeping mind picks up on his grief through the paint, the plaster and the wood, and my dreams become inexplicably sad.
Actually, my dreams are very explicably sad; but the point stands. And it may be true; only, since there’s no way of knowing, and nothing to do with it if you did know, we may as well ignore it, anyway.
Broken dreams are not to be confused with lucid dreams, that delicious rare and infinitely dangerous state, that you catch sometimes when you are drifting asleep or slipping awake; but I want to come back to that later.
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S. says that you always dream most vividly when you sleep on your back, which I’m willing to believe is true. But, of course, when I’m sleeping on my back is precisely when I snore most ferociously; which gives us the following moral: that if I want to have really vivid dreams, other people will have to pay for them.
(Alternatively, it’s yet another argument in favour of sleeping alone – as it is said that in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve had separate though adjoining homes, or else lived each in one half of a duplex, the original hebrew is a little unclear. Or again, alternatively, it’s yet another reminder of the weird adjunct and interactions between the state of the body, state of the mind, and state of the soul; and so forth. Or alternatively again, S. is full of it.)
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The idea that we are dreaming always, but we only notice at night, when there’s nothing to drown it out or take our attention away.
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The woman who dreamt each night of cutting herself on broken glass, and one day fainted and was taken to the hospital, where they diagnosed her with anemia. Only, everyone thought the anemia caused the dreams, when really it was the other way around. And I know at least one woman who got pregnant from a bad dream, but she had an abortion, and I can’t say I blame her, though it was a great loss to science.
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How sometimes there is a crack in sleep, and your dreams seep into the waking day; and there do irreparable damage.
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It is certain that God sometimes speaks to us through the medium of our dreams; but as this is invasive and bad manners, I strongly urge you to ignore all such occurrences, you’ll only encourage Him.
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The old wives’ tale that if you die in your dream, you die in actuality; and that’s why, for example, if you dream of falling off a building, you will always wake up before you hit the ground. Which is certainly untrue, but what’s interesting is how persistent, and I think spontaneous, the idea is. I’m sure that every generation of children evolves that notion entirely on its own, and believes in it devoutly; and that belief probably persists, half-recognized, well into adulthood. Which probably goes to show something, but I couldn’t tell you what.
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How certain dreams insist upon returning and repeating, turning themselves over and over again, though they probably weren’t worth dreaming in the first place.
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The idea that dreaming and the way we dream, demonstrates the mind’s need to make stories, in order to make sense: which is a weasely idea, developed by writers to make themselves feel important; but it may coincidentally be true.
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How sometimes we wake up, not aware of having dreamt at all; then later in the day, something clicks or triggers, and a memory of the dream comes flooding back. Or that time I had a dream, in which R. was being an asshole; didn’t remember it in the morning, but was very irritable with R. when he picked me up for work, very bitchy and short and snapped at him, for no apparent reason; only later remembered about my dream, and apologized. And he still enjoys bringing that up.
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Whether two people sharing a bed, head by head, may sometimes infect one another’s dreams, or spill each into the other. And that dreams are so intimate and private, sexual intercourse is a social nicety compared to it; and I am sure that this is a central and unacknowledged factor in many divorces, and other forms of hatred.
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That we all know damn well, upon waking, whether what we have dreamt (if we remember it) has been meaningless, though maybe entertaining; or if it has been meaningful, welling up from somewhere deep inside the soul; or if it has indeed infected us from an entirely external source, as sometimes happens.
We all know it perfectly well, if we let ourselves know that we know it. Only, we are all so loathe to abandon our little beliefs and dogmas, or what our friends believe, or that book we read last week; and anyway, that damn alarm is going off again, and we have to get the kids dressed for school, and if we’re late for work again this week…
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Because the true art of interpreting dreams, is to forego trying to interpret them at all, and instead to correctly remember them.
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P, who often has dreams that seem to be of holes in her memory, great stretches of her childhood that she can’t remember; but the dreams slip away as well, and only remind her of her loss.
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Those dreams when you know you are asleep and dreaming. And more than once I have dreamt that I was asleep and dreaming while the house around me was on fire, and I was trying and trying to wake up, but could not, no matter how I struggled. And I remember that I was not so much worried about myself, but sure that others needed my help, but I couldn’t wake up; and the feeling of helplessness, that when I finally would awake, there would be tears of frustration in my eyes, and drenched in sweat.
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How sometimes I have dreamt so vividly of something I wanted so much to be true, that I woke up feeling, at first, a deep warm satisfaction, and sense of peace.
And then, turning in my bed to sit up, no sooner had my feet touched the ground than I had remembered that it was only a dream. And to be left there, like that, how I felt abandoned; and I don’t think I’ve ever been lonelier or more helpless than at those moments.
Kevin Fournier is a Winnipeg-based writer. His first novel, Sandbag Shuffle, is published by Thistledown Press. He also blogs at Who Put Back the Clock? and writes The Back Page column.