Dreaming

Being able to remember the sixties, we are now told by raddled potheads, is proof you weren't really there. Observing the decade of love from prim sidelines, bounded on one side by the cage of a devout school and the other by self-righteous atheistic parents, I rode a bicycle while others celebrated the exhilaration of motorbikes. So I sought solace in the most accessible and least regulated immersive experience: dreams.  A good dream, I confided blithely to an incredulous friend, is better than a party. Of course, a party to which one wasn't invited.

We spend a third of our lives sleeping, or trying to, and much of that time dreaming, yet except for psychologists' desiccated analysis of their hidden meaning, the experience is disdained. Few criticisms of plans are as caustic as characterising them as a dreams.

It is life which informs dreams, much as it is life which informs art, the only implausible alternative being divine inspiration. So instead of links between yesterday's experience and last night's dream being viewed as an explanation after which the dream can be discarded, ('Ah, that's why I had that dream') the dream itself should be treasured, just as we value the transformative value of interpretations of the 'real' world presented by artists. Solving the provenance, in other words, while interesting, is not the point.

In literature, the distinction between fiction and non-fiction is a boundary acknowledged within English yet absent in many other cultures, for example Arabic. It may have arisen from the need to establish the primacy of the bible and is sustained by bookstores for organisational purposes but is now being challenged. Similarly the relationship we have with dreams requires reconsidering.
Their impermanence, which is in any case at best a risible concept to mortals, is not a valid objection. Performance art rejoices in transitoriness, its temporality adding the spice of exclusivity.

For some, the barrier is already porous. The hypnopompic state is the liminal condition occupying the transition between sleep and burgeoning consciousness, a richly creative territory with characteristics of both dream and reality. And those who have mastered the technique of lucid dreaming claim to be aware of their state and able to control their dream's trajectory, although sceptics remark that we only have the dreamer's word for their experience and that another explanation might be micro-awakening. But this misses the point. The audience in a theatre is not invited to interrupt proceedings with suggestions for the denouement, so no more should the conscious mind seek to influence the outcome of a dream.

Lucid dreaming has a mirror image, in which the sleep/wake barrier is completely impermeable. In this, the dreamer is convinced that the dream is real, accompanied by the frustrated wish that it were a dream but burdened by the apparent knowledge that it is not. The more extreme or distressing the dream situation, the more convincing is the false certainty that it is not a dream, as though both the content and the context are intensified by the same mechanism which deliberately intends to ensure the dream state remains sealed and experienced as acutely as possible. In a recent dream, I had mislaid my laptop and now, days later, recall fervently wishing it was a dream while believing it was not. Waking from such turbulence is initially a relief but soon overshadowed by an unresolvable angst. If when actually dreaming I felt so certain that it was not a dream, how can I have solid faith in my belief that I am not dreaming now? Could the present simply be one more level of awareness nested inside countless others whose layers I am penetrating in successive awakenings? No doubt examination of brain activity enables categorical differentiation between states of consciousness, but this is of little comfort during early morning awakenings especially following a dream in which I even stuck a pin in my thumb to prove to myself its reality.

In retirement, as opportunities to participate in mainstream life dwindle, dreams regain their appeal and longer sleeps permit an elegiac blending with contemplations, memories and regrets, presaging the eventual abandonment of consciousness.

© David Thompson 2016