…….perchance to dream…………

                                                ….perchance to dream….

                                                        by Marco M. Pardi

“Rather than be confronted with an overwhelming proof of the limitations of our understanding, we accuse the dreams of not making sense.” Erich Fromm (1900-1980) The Forgotten Language: An Introduction to the Understanding of Dreams, Fairy Tales, and Myths. 1951

All comments welcome.

Most of us are familiar with Prince Hamlet’s soliloquy in the opening of the “Nunnery Scene” of Hamlet.  In contemplating death and suicide he opens with, To be or not to be….and nine and ten lines later says, to sleep, perchance to dream. Aye, there’s the rub.  For in that sleep of Death what dreams may come.   

Taken together, these statements are confusing.  At first there seems an uncompromising distinction between his waking, conscious state and nothing – non-being.  But he then proposes death is sleep, infused with uncertain dreams.

Although by Shakespeare’s time (1554 – 1616) many hundreds, if not thousands of philosophers, scientists (to use a later term), religious figures, military commanders, artists in various media, and inventors had cited dreams as the inspiration (in spire: to breathe into life/mind) of their subsequent actions, creations, or discoveries,  it was Rene Descartes (1596 – 1650), wrestling with a Pythagorean concept  who, in reading the Latin poets came across the line, Quad vitae sectabar iter? – What path of life shall I pursue? and dreamed a visitation from a stranger who answered him, Est et non – To be and not to be.  The Cartesian and fundamentally altered the equation, leading to Cartesian Dualism and the subsequent centuries of the mind/body problem.

For most of my life I had no compelling interest in the phenomenology of dreaming, considering it a simple fact and occasional curiosity.  I met people who claimed they never dreamed.  Of course, Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman (U. of Chicago) produced breakthrough research on REM – Rapid Eye Movement, in 1953 ( E. Aserinsky and N. Kleitman, “Regularly Occurring Periods of Eye Motility, and Concomitant Phenomena During Sleep,”  Science 118 (1953): 273-74. Their work demonstrated clearly the association of REM and dreaming throughout humans, and later in most mammals. So the claim of not dreaming is mistaken; it should be a claim of not remembering dreams.  But how sad.  These people are living their lives with approximately one third missing.  I was more startled in college when I read of the large percentage who dreamed in black & white.  My first thought was, way back then, they watch too much television (black and white for most people then).  But that made no sense.         

As I began to formalize my interest in the study of Mankind the importance of dreams and dreaming emerged as both a cultural engine and a tool for understanding cultures.

Reading Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell and others I came across ideas of pan-cultural symbology, issues in interpretation, and “pre-cognitive” dreaming.  I remembered a dream I had at age five in which I was playing with and being in (this must sound familiar) an open Jeep with a green body and red fenders.  My only experience with a Jeep to that point was the wild ride from Roma to the port of Ostia with (then) Captain James Angleton – “Uncle Jimmy” at the wheel. We boarded a Swedish ship bound for the U.S.  Obviously, no military Jeeps were painted that way. But about two weeks after the dream my grandfather brought me a toy Jeep, exactly like the one I had dreamed.

In the military, I dreamed I was sitting at breakfast in the mess hall with some of the guys in my unit – something I had never done, and having a conversation. It was what I would later learn was a “lucid” dream. Then, some few mornings later, I found myself at that exact table with the exact individuals and I “came alert” during the conversation such that I knew who would say exactly what and when they would say it. I even sat quietly somewhere inside me while I spoke my parts.

Checking my daily mail in graduate school I realized one day I had, the night before, dreamed exactly what was in the mail right down to the junk mail. And, I had been doing this for about two weeks.  The realization seems to have stopped it; it never recurred.

But later I had a lucid dream of a commercial airplane crash and it happened a couple of days later.  Another such dream happened and I mentioned it to a couple of my staff and also told them of the first dream.  The second plane crashed soon after.  Since all of us (eleven staff and myself) were frequently hopping flights for somewhere, my staff were soon coming to me before flights with inquiries about my dreams. But as soon as it was out in the open and discussed it stopped. 

Even in early years my realization of mysticism grew strongly.  A Buddhist saying is, One does not convert to Buddhism; one realizes one is Buddhist. So I came across narratives of and about “incubation” dreams: a process wherein a specific result is desired and the dreamer performs certain actions before sleep to bring it about.  Commonly, these include such things as sleeping in or outside a place regarded as significant to the belief/philosophical system to which the sleeper subscribes.  Extending probably long before recorded history, this practice can still be found in remote villages throughout much of the Old World. To my knowledge I’ve never done such as thing, at least as far as I know. And given my native openness to all of Gaia at large, I’m unlikely to ever do so.  When I go to bed at night my last conscious thought is usually: Entertain me.

But I have examined various books purporting to provide you with the power to control your dreams. The methodology seems as varied and as “woo-woo” as the market will bear. In the same vein, books claiming to explain the meaning of your dreams seem just as contrived and nonsensical. I scanned through the catalogued images and continually asked myself, Who dreams this stuff? I dream everyday, rational – albeit often tedious imagery; the only monsters are people I have known and I dispose of them in realistic and appropriate fashion. But apparently just about anything sells.

One of the more attractive systems of science based thought, divulged after many chapters of brain physiology and related arcana, is that dreaming is simply the mind acting as an in-sinkerator, grinding and flushing the billions of bits of data and partially formed impressions we take in daily, mix with stored memory images, and do not meaningfully process. This makes the Control Your Dreams vogue rather meaningless. Or maybe I’m just lazy. But, I have had nights when I disliked the dream on that “channel”, turned over and began dreaming something else, only to return to the first channel and pick up where I left off.  That seems to weaken the in-sinkerator position.

Many of the people I cited very early in this piece kept dream journals.  As age advances I’m up more frequently at night so should have easy access to doing so.  But, with as little sleep as I now get I’m not keen on turning on the light to scribble bits and pieces through the night.

And speaking of getting up, I went through a spate of “flying dreams”.  Quite exhilarating, these were usually so lucid I wondered if they were Out of Body Experiences.  My “test” was, if I’m asleep dreaming at night and I’m “flying” in daylight over local terrain it can’t be real. Maybe that’s simple minded.  No doubt some amateur quantum physicist would remind me Time is irrelevant.  For now I’ll stick with William of Occam’s Razor: If it looks like night, it’s night.  

There are more categories of dreams than I have listed. But I suggest logical caution when examining them.  Some metaphysical bookstores have very occasional books of value amid the groaning shelves of New Age clap-trap. You have to know your subject.  My position is that books purporting to provide dream interpretation, whether in bookstores or grocery check-out lines are fantasies.  Perhaps with the exception of pre-cognitive dreams, dreams are intensely subjective experiences, cobbled together by elements pertinent only to the dreamer. Should I ever decide to enlist outside assistance in such interpretation it would be from a Board Certified mental health professional deeply familiar with my reality, not some charlatan hawking books at a psychic fair.  Publishers of these book do have one dream in common: Get your money.

Ah, bedtime draws nigh.  So I will leave you with this refrain, “Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.” And if you encounter an obstacle on your cruise, it’s only me – up the creek without a paddle. Not to worry. I’ll resolve it. I always do.