This is an evolving collection of dreams. I'm not yet sure how much weight to lend to dreams. Are they just the brain's attempt to make sense of random neural static? Are they jets of unconscious desire and fear, spouting from the fissure of sleep? Or is a dream a contact with a territory, lost and unfamiliar, but nonetheless real? Biological necessity, or emergent fluff?
My assessment is that dreams are a significant piece of life's mystery, and I think Science took a bold step forward when psychotherapy tackled dreams. But I'm wary of, say, locating every feature of a dream in the private neuroses of the dreamer. I think that the dream world is a region of profound commonality between humans, by virtue of which we can understand our connection to one another. If in sleep we enter into the same mystery, then how alien can you be from me?
There are different kinds of dreams. Some are brief, powerful, laden with significance. Others are absurdly mundane. Most swing between the two extremes. But they always have an essence, an Otherness, which (in retrospect) seems to set them apart from our waking experiences. In a society which fetishizes the Cartesian grid, which funnels the Ecstatic into DEA-approved experiences like football and Sunday mass, I would argue this: The dream is the last stronghold of the transcendant. As such, it points to something intrinsically human. The dream is dismissed by reductionist science; attempts to invoke the dreamstate without sleep are punished ferociously by the power elite -- and yet we all dream. This other world is part of our birthright, and I encourage everyone to explore it.
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The sequence of the dream is unclear and complex, but a few basic elements emerged. Primary was the sensation — and for part of the dream, the metaphor — of exploring an infinitely varied, yet somehow contained, space. Specific to this feeling, I think, was the contrast between exploration and trespass. Though I entered buildings […]
My family and I are driving through a city. It’s dingy and half-abandoned, industrial, like cities I have seen in dreams before. We are actually driving along a single road that passes — seemingly — along the outskirts of the city. Or maybe it is that the whole city is so desolate, there is no […]
I’m walking with a person from work down a suburban-rural road, with lots of vegetation and trees. I don’t know where we’re returning from, but we are passing what in the dream I knew to be my house. The house itself is set back from the road some distance, and we are passing the fenced-in […]