If you missed Part I, give it a read. Otherwise, I delve further. While I think we can all agree that the subject matter of our dreams is still under investigation and up for debate, there is no discussion about how real some of them feel. Whether you wake up with a racing heart because your friend’s dad was chasing you through the neighborhood, testing your knowledge of side gates and alleyways, or you wake up with a racing heart because you just got caught having sex in public, there are physical and emotional reactions that our body has to dreams.
Dreams can be unwelcomed. They can be jarring. They can terrify you or elevate you. They can push you to the edge of a dark abyss, or keep you on the cusp of experiencing the thrill of a life time. They can vary in length, depth, detail, and logic. I’m far from exploring the idea that various aspects of my dream can be interpreted in certain ways. “Acquiring the ability to interpret your dreams is a powerful tool. In analyzing your dreams, you can learn about your deep secrets and hidden feelings.” What a crock of shit. Stop trying to sell books to people that believe seeing a lemur in your dream ‘indicates that there is something in your life that you are not seeing clearly.’ Oh really?
So, I don’t put stock in the various explanations offered for what you can remember dreaming about, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think dreams influence the way we live.
Recently I woke up from a dream that couldn’t have been more vivid. To this day, almost a week later, I can still see the intersection I was standing. I can still see my friend, walking away, turning, coming back to say one more thing, and then me doing the same. I don’t want to bore you with any more details, but I wanted to prove this this scene is still reverberating in my mind like an actual memory, not a fabricated one. Even some of the most detailed dreams fade quickly after sunrise. I know I’ve had dreams that I don’t think I’ll ever forget, and their gone by the time I try to mention it at lunch. For some reason, this one has stayed with me. And it’s done so in a way that actually caused action. I’m not sure how that action will be received, but that’s not the point. The thing is, it took a dream to help me wake up.
Besides being pushed to action, think of how many dreams change your perception of someone or something. This is the closest way I can get to believing in repressed feelings or hidden desires. Though not often realistic, there have been countless times that I woke up after a dream and thought something like, ‘wow, so and so looked great,’ or ‘man, so and so really is an asshole.’ It could be someone sufficiently present in your day to day life, or someone that you haven’t seen in years, but something in your dreams causes you to see them in a new light. These kinds of things can really mess with your mind, because you’re quite possibly letting something that didn’t actually happen change how you treat someone. So you end up trying to figure out if your brain is trying to let you in a hidden little secret, or if it was just a random sequence of events that now has you completely confused.
How do you trust something that you had no control over creating? Is it any more or less insane that trusting something a fictional character said in a movie, or a 17th century philosopher said during a time without the internet? We so casually accept a few select minds of the last thousand years as genius, but how comparable is that life with ours. And we (I) so casually assign the words of wisdom written and spoken by some of the great, and not-so-great minds of our current entertainment profession without grasping the idea that it’s just the words of the person or people behind the curtain, not the character we’ve grown so fond of. So how much stock can we put in ourselves. If dreams can impact your life in a positive way, is there any method to the madness behind our minds. I’m scared of what my mind is capable of while I’m asleep, but maybe waking up to disappointment is only a small price to pay for the possibilities a dream can open.
There are a lot of things I don’t believe in, mainly because I don’t like losing autonomy. Selfishly, I like to be responsible for my own thoughts and actions. Which is why dreams pose a new problem for me, since, quite obviously, dreams are created internally, with no one to blame but my own mind. So if the rest of my decisions, thoughts, actions, beliefs, and ways of life are controlled and calculated, maybe dreams are just the element of chaos we need for balance. The long ass stick in the hands of our high-wire act called life.
No comments:
Post a Comment