DREAMLIFE

The  notion that your dreams are trying to tell you something can be quite exhausting. Dreams seldom present you with any clear meaning; and mostly don’t appear to have anything to do with one’s current daylife concerns. But for people who are seeking some sort of spiritual or psychological answers, dreams seems to offer something, since they obviously come from somewhere deep within.

But there’s a nasty little trap here that can send you off on a fruitless struggle because dreams offer a puzzle that is just as ambivalent and problematic as life itself.

As a young man, I came up against the tricky question of dream interpretation. I would get annoyed with the ambivalence of my own dreams. “If they are trying to give me a message why the hell don’t they say what they mean clearly?”

I tried very hard, filling whole diaries full of my dreams and their meaning. But I always had the sneaky suspicion that I was trying to make them fit my explanations. I was trying to squeeze them into a bottle for which they were too rowdy and boisterous. I think now the perversity of my dreamlife was a strong resistance to being commandeered, hijacked by the narrowness of my mind.

It’s a mistake to focus on what a dream means. A dream isn’t symbolic. It doesn’t mean something else. It’s like insisting that a walk in the park has some hidden significance that’s more real than the park. This diverts our focus away from the experience of the dream itself and turns it into a head trip. The spiritual value of the dream doesn’t lie in left-brain rationality, it lies in the concrete experience of the dream itself. It is the connection with pure non-rational nature that does us good.

We should just value our dreamlife for what it is, just as we would value going for a walk in natural surroundings, provided, that is, we walk for the sake of the walk and not for some other reason. We could walk for the exercise or to give the dogs a workout. How about going for a walk just for itself.

Oh sure, a walk in the park is good for your health, but an over-focus on this this tends to diminish the experience and can turn a stroll into jogging or power walking. Your heart may benefit, but you will have missed the park.

Of course, our dreamworld is sometimes more like Jurassic Park than a civilised botanic gardens. So we have this ambitious relationship with our dreamlife; we can’t give it a singularity it doesn’t have. In premodern times dreams were important for their prophetic and divinatory value. This practice disappeared with the end of medievalism, only surfacing again at the time of Freud and psychoanalysis. Dreams were once again important, but again only for their practical value.

But spite of this focus on dream interpretation in psychotherapy it had some value because it encouraged us to pay attention to our dreams, writing them down, thinking about them. It allowed us to ‘free associate’ and to wander, expanding on the dream, dreaming it further. All to the good, but spoiled by the interpretation at the end.

The spiritual value of the dream lies in the connection to the pure experience of it, to its sharpness of feeling and sensation. I don’t mean the emotions it provokes, I mean the outlandish perceptions that hang around afterwards, the strangeness, the familiar unfamiliarity, the buzz of confusion, the vivid impact of the dream before it slides under the floorboards, out of sight as you come to daytime consciousness. I think our daytime consciousness is afraid of dreamlife because it comes from another realm and disturbs. Our daylife rapidly quashes the dream, so that five minutes after you wake up the memory of it has entirely vanished; and try as you may to remember – it’s gone. The dayworld suppresses all other dominions. Dreams are not welcome in our dayworld because they tend to subvert the dominant paradigm and unravel the world as we know it.

Look upon a dream as a visitations from another realm, another dimension – as though a UFO had landed in your backyard to take you on a trip. It is just such other realms that can expand the narrowness of our daytime consciousness if we can permit it to. Not that we have any choice. Our conscious mind cannot choose or decide on these things any more than it can decide to go to sleep. Insomniacs are told the way to sleep is to ‘let go’ ‘to surrender’ – but the conscious mind cannot let go. It doesn’t know how to. It has to be overtaken. This is why we use substances to surrender to those other dominions.

It’s quite impossible to decide to be overtaken, but we can change the way we look at these things

I did.

That will set us on the move. 

Just a little note here. I had nearly completed this essay early this morning when I found myself getting quite sleepy in front of the computer. I decided to lie down even though it was only six o clock.Then came this vivid dream. I found myself floating around the room singing ecstatically. A woman came to the door and gave me this gift. It was a large mechanical bird – mechanical yet full of life. I was quite alarmed by the way it clung to me. Then the woman gave me an aquarium from which emerged a snake that reach toward me. I awoke astonished at the vividness of the dream that could have lasted no more than five minutes. Holding my head in my hands I repeated over and over: what an amazing dream – what an amazing dream.

And it was – it was so real.