I don’t generally put much credence in decoding one’s dreams. Maybe this is because I rarely have dreams. (Avid dreamers are usually pretty quick to jump on this, asserting that I have dreams but I just don’t remember them. But isn’t that kind of like the tree falling in an empty forest thing? If I don’t remember them, then effectively I didn’t have them since nobody else was there either…but I digress.) Maybe it’s from working in sleep research and hearing over and over that dream research is hooey and all conclusions are unsubstantiated. I don’t know, just never been a big fan.
Nevertheless I have recently started having a re-occurring dream and I do not like it. In this dream my sister dies, never in a specific or violent manner, but suddenly she is just gone and it is very clear that she will not be coming back. The majority of the dream is taken up by an incredibly acute sense of loss and ache…it’s horribly real and hard to shake once I wake up. The first (recent) time that I had this dream I woke up in an absolute panic at the thought that my sister might be gone. The initial panic faded once I realized that I had been dreaming, only to be replaced by a distinct feeling of unease. I had had this dream before. Several years ago I had a dream in which I lost my sister. It was the first time that I had ever even considered a life without her in it; she’s been with me my whole life after all. Honestly, it was what made me realize how incredibly important she was (and is) to me, how loosing her frightens me more than most things. But why has it started again? In the wake of the unease created by this dream, and the feelings experienced IN the dream itself I can’t help but start looking up what ‘death’ and ‘loss’ are supposed to mean in dreams.
Is this why we search for meaning in dreams? Because the feelings that we experience in them while asleep can be so acute? So strong? So real that they linger within us even after we’ve woken up?
The purpose of sleep is clearly restorative. Severe insomnia that hinders a person from sleeping completely for a prolonged period of time results in insanity and ultimately death. Clearly our brains require that down time, but it [the brain] never completely shuts down. Like sleeping fish that continue to swim against the current while slumbering, our brains continue to function while we sleep. My friend Ashleigh see’s her sleeping brain as a closet with thousands of closed drawers and when she dreams, it’s as if a small gremlin has gone in and started pulling things out of drawers and random and tossing them into her sleeping consciousness. It’s a fun picture and usually when I dream it is what I think of. Does that explain the incredibly clear and real dreams such as the one I have been having about my sister? Maybe it should, that at random certain drawers were open and my mind gave meaning to what came out. That doesn’t really make me feel better though.
I think that it is a desire to explain the inexplicable that drives us to create and refer to dream dictionaries and divine explanations for our dreams. This wouldn’t be so unthinkable; people do it all the time. Anthropologists explain religion this way, early people built belief structures around higher, all powerful, omniscient and intervening God / Gods to explain the things that observation alone could not explain: the change of seasons, time of day, birth, death, natural disasters. All of these things could be perplexing and frightening; it’s easier as a human to explain it away with a divine being than admit that not only do we not know, but we are powerless to prevent or even predict their occurrence. Maybe this is what we are doing with our dreams, creating meaning where there is none simply to quiet our minds and souls. Disconcerted (as I am) with the strength and clarity of some dreams and they very real emotions that accompany them, we look for meaning in the most interesting of ways.
Regardless – I would like my dream to stop and am hoping that by addressing it in my conscious state, it will cease in my unconscious states.
1 comment:
a fascinating a vunerable dream... thanks for sharing. I too am skeptical about the way most people talk about "dream interpretation" - and I am a dream researcher myself. may I suggest, as far as your most recent repetitive dream is concerned, that you ask "why this dream now?" Quantative dream research (such as Bill Domhoff's work) has shown that dreams more often than not reflect our waking concerns - it's called the continuity hypothesis. The concerns are not usually logical, but strongly emotional. As they say in my circles, only you can make meaning (or choose to not make meaning) from your dreams...
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