“I believe in everything until it's disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it's in your mind. Who's to say that dreams and nightmares aren't as real as the here and now?”
John Lennon
I love my dreams. From funny little daydreams that catch me by surprise, to full length, cinematic nighttime epics that twist and tumble through layers of complexity, symbolism and nonsense. They amaze me and inspire me in equal measure. I’m amazed by the richness of experience that seems to be conjured from nothing inside my head. Inspired by the possibility that our dream space is a glimpse into a greater mystery that hides from us in our waking hours.
Dreams have inspired us for as long as we’ve been conscious. Although we can only guess at their significance to prehistoric cultures, in many ongoing pagan religions dreams are seen as a link between the middle (our) world and upper and lower (spirits, ancestors, gods) worlds. In ancient Egypt and Greece, dreams were thought to be messages from the Devine, and being able to receive and interpret them was considered a great honour and skill. Although our contemporary western, euro-american culture tends in the main to see dreams as a curious product of our idling minds, many indigenous societies see dreaming as part of, or perhaps even evidence of, the true nature of our universal reality. A reality beyond time, beyond life and death, beyond ourselves.
“Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”
CarlJung
It’s not only dreams, but also the act of sleeping that fills me with wonder. That we can wilfully and with very little effort slip into an unconscious state - where our mind and body become disconnected but still functioning, where we can rejuvenate, process and repair - amazes me. My medical wife has often mentioned that during her training, anaesthesia (the controlled onset of sleep and unconsciousness) was described as a step on the continuum towards death. And sleep feels a lot like this, our bodies slowing to as near a stop as they dare whilst our minds take a step out of this world and peer into another. Anyone who’s ever fainted, fitted or been knocked unconscious will be familiar with this place. On the few occasions when I’ve experienced a fit, I’ve seen the most amazing visions and woken up not feeling sick but weirdly energised and excited. Like I’ve been upgraded and restarted and my mind is working with perfect clarity.
Considering how important sleep is to us and how much time we all spend sleeping, you won’t be surprised to know that there’s a fair amount of research on it. Institutes and societies, university departments, studies and papers. It’s fascinating stuff (I’ve linked to a few resources below), exploring the phases of sleep; how our mind behaves going into and out of sleep; how sleep links to general health and development; the relationship between sleep and mental health, dementia, thought processes; what happens to our bodies and minds when we don’t get enough of it.
One thing I can’t find an answer to though, is what exactly it is and how we do it. There’s lots about the mechanics of non-REM sleep, REM sleep, how our breathing slows down, decreased brain activity etc etc, but I still can’t find anything on the tipping point. How exactly we go from being awake to being asleep, and what our conscious mind does, or where it goes to when we’re sleeping. Perhaps the answer is spread throughout all the research, more of a sense than a sentence, but I can’t see it. My old physics teacher used to get really cross with me for getting hung up on things like this, but I can’t help but ask. How do we fall into sleep? If you can answer this for me please let me know!
Dreaming is much less researched, which seems very strange to me since we’ve been writing songs, stories and poetry, making pictures and movies about dreams and dreaming for ever. I might be miss-characterising it - so again please share interesting sites, papers or people you know about - but dream research seems to fail into two camps; the science-y camp - what your brain does while you’re dreaming, chemical processes, dreams and memory stores; and the therapy camp - dreams as psychotherapy indicators, what your dreams mean. Nothing wrong with these two, but they both seem to start with an assumption that your dreams are happening in your head (not even really a mind distributed throughout your body). Dream research, as far as I can see, comes down to taking pictures of your brain whilst you’re dreaming, poking it to make you dream, or talking about your dreams afterwards. Where we dream and how dreaming might involve a different scale of consciousness, is never really considered.
“Those who dream by day are cognisant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.”
Edgar Allan Poe
Like many questions to do with consciousness and the products of our minds, there are no real truths and no real falsehoods, so we get to lift the lid on everything we think we know and explore our wildest ideas, hopes and hunches. For me, there are four possible theories on the nature of dreams. Four daydreams to enjoy.
Dreams are just dreams
This is probably where most of us are, whether coming at it from a science or therapy position. It’s still pretty amazing. The links we make, the people we meet, the things we imagine and how all of this may help us in processing data and emotions, role playing social scenarios or danger situations, finding solutions to problems we can’t solve in our waking lives. But, dreams are just dreams. The product of our brain activity and firmly held within the boundaries of our physical selves.Dreams are a place where our subconscious meet
Are dreams a playground, where the part of us that can reach out and connect with other consciousnesses gets to stretch out and run free?
We can keep a foot in the first theory - that dreams are just dreams - and still dip a toe in this one. Who are all these other entities that we meet in our dreams? Not just people, but animals and even unknown beings from places we know and places we don’t, from the present, past and future.
There’s a theory that all the people (beings) we meet in our dreams are beings we’ve already met, or seen somewhere before. I like this idea, it makes a lot of sense, but I also have this nagging feeling that maybe they’re coming from somewhere else. Maybe we all feel this?
Are the others in my dreams just other versions of me, or are they extensions of other dreamers, the person lying next to me, a few doors down, the bird in the tree or a mind from somewhere I’ve never imagined? It’s just a gut feeling. An intuition. Not very science-y for sure, but we shouldn’t be afraid of giving a nod to intuition, particularly in the realm of dreams and consciousness where a pure science approach seems to struggle to give us the whole picture.Dreams are a whole other realm
Things get a bit more fun from here on. Perhaps dreams are all in our minds, but it does feel tantalisingly like a place we go too, doesn’t it?
Dreams feel different to just closing our eyes and imagining stuff, they feel like somewhere we visit. Somewhere our consciousness goes to. I get the same feeling during deep meditation. After a while there’s a tangible shift in my senses. My perception makes a noticeable change in location although I know I’m also still ‘here’. A bit like the intuition mentioned above, this is hard to prove or disprove, but we can point it out and say “yeah, this feels different”.
Where or what this other place is, is anyone’s guess. Perhaps the atoms and electrical energy that connect us all, perhaps the dark matter that we know is there but are yet unable to explain, perhaps an entirely different dimension that only our non-physical selves can access.Dreams are a glimpse of reality free from the limitation of consciousness
Pushing our theories out a little further, perhaps dream space is all of the above, but more. Not another place we go to, not a place other minds come into, but what reality really looks like when our waking mind is not filtering and simplifying.
It’s fair to say that living in a dream state would be pretty confusing, and we already know that we subconsciously filter a huge amount of what we receive and how we operate to make day to day survival more manageable. Perhaps when we sleep, when we don’t need to interact with the world around us, we turn off that filter. Perhaps dreaming is us just wandering carefree and uninhibited through the true nature of reality?
I’m sure there are ways to disprove some of these ideas, maybe we can chip at the edges of their likelihood or refine them a little, but I’m not so sure we can discount them with confidence. As a species, we haven’t really gotten close to understanding what our consciousness is, how it comes into being and how (or if) it’s distinct from what we experience. So, our reality and what it means to dream, is by inference also up for interpretation and exploration.
There’s probably a bunch of other ideas that you might have on what dreaming is, and I hope you can share them here. I’ll always choose to fill my world with the unknown and fantastical possibilities that are offered to us, rather than lock myself in the gloomy closet of certainty.
I dreamed I was a butterfly, flitting around in the sky; then I awoke. Now I wonder: Am I a man who dreamt of being a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming that I am a man?
Zhuanazi
Still from ‘Un Carnet De Bal’, Julien Duvivier
Still from ‘Spellbound’, Alfred Hitchcock
I love your exploration of this!
Dreams, the last great unexplored frontier.
I think that dreams are everything you have suggested, and more.
A couple of things I have noticed myself for consideration:
Why is it that I can 'feel' my dream throughout the whole following day, up until my next dream cycle, as if it is still underway? When I say feel, I mean I can feel myself there, even if I can't remember the specifics of the dream, I can feel the 'energy' of it for lack of a better term.
And why is it that in my dreams I know myself as myself, but generally speaking, I am lacking all of the normal considerations of my waking life? My history, circumstances, reason all seem to be lacking. Sometimes I have dreams that work out various circumstances from my waking life, but by and large those things are missing from my more common, 'ethereal' dreams.
And as I have suggested in some of my columns, science is missing the biggest piece of information that would provide many answers -- our Consciousness. If we were to understand who and what we actually are and our purpose, it would offer us a grate deal more insight into these subjects.
When science is still viewing everything as "persona non grata" without empirical evidence, it is hardly a surprise that there is little exploration into all of these questions of dreams that you have provided.
Great article!