The Friday Fillip: Sweet Dreams

Few things are as boring as someone else’s dream.

If you don’t believe me, I invite you to sample some dreams recorded as part of a research project and accessible at the DreamBank. Here’s a dream chosen at random:

A group of friends and I are standing in a long line of people waiting to enter a patriotic shrine or public monument. The group is in a rowdy mood and there is much joking and kidding. As we walk single file through an underground hallway at the entrance we notice that there are signs hanging on the walls spelling out the rules for the monument. They state, “No Smoking”, “No Eating”, “No Drinking”, and so on. When we see a sign that says, “No Onions”, everyone laughs at how ridiculous this is. “I guess carrots are okay”, I joke sarcastically, “just no onions.” Someone ahead in the line calls down, “No salad.” “No salad?”, I respond. “What about vegetable oil?” “No vegetable oil”, comes the reply. Sure enough, just then I pass under a doorway where the two lines “No Salad, No Vegetable Oil” are painted overhead.

Strictly a case of “you had to be there” — or better: you had to be the dreamer. So much is dependent on associations and personal history for significance that the bare signposts — the mere events — lack any interest.

Yet fiction writers persist in including dream sequences in their works, with the result, in my view, that they’re either quite unlike a real dream or they’re hermetic and boring. Since fiction is itself an elaborate dream — a daydream, perhaps — there’s really no need to paint the lily.

But the fact of dreaming and one’s own dreams have a continuing fascination for us. Remarkably, dreams are involuntary creative acts, tales from the unconscious, and what could be more intriguing than a glimpse of an otherwise inaccessible construct or centre of thought within us, proof that each of us is “mysterious” to some degree.

But at the same time we want to know what dreams mean. In fact, I’d wager there’s never been a time when dream interpretation wasn’t a viable profession. It goes back at least to the earliest written dreams, those of the Sumerian King of Lagash more than four thousand years ago, interpreted by a goddess, Nanse. (See here for the actual, translated text of the cuniform cylinder.) The rest of us have to make do with sublunary Freud, Jung, and other analysts of the modern unconscious — who at least tried to reach for the heavens with sex and mythical archetypes.

Now the royal road to the unconscious involves great magnets, radiation, theta waves and the like. But I think it’s fair to say that currently science has no agreed-upon explanation of dreams or view of their relevance to waking life. In this, dreaming joins those other simple, fundamental human acts that have no clear evident purpose: sleeping, crying, and laughing.

Perhaps dreams in their ambiguity, their ability to support many interpretations, are exactly where we want them to be, balancing for us our wish to have the potential suggested by mystery against our appetite for self-knowledge and the satisfaction of meaning.

Now if all of this is just too vague for you, I commend the Dream Bible to you. Here you’ll find the meaning of all manner of dream elements, including that ever popular figure, the blue alligator, the import of which is as follows:

To dream of a blue alligator symbolizes a powerful fear of a positive situation. You possibly have strong insecurities or anxieties about something that is good for you.