I omit references within the text as this is a familiar
essay, far from a scholarly one. My
readers will have noticed that I am hardly a nice observer of the distinction,
though, and I have decided to append a general list of a few sources unnamed in
the body of the piece, many of which are well-known.
Sir Thomas Browne
observes in his excellent essay on dreams “that some have never dreamed is as
improbable as that some have never laughed.” People all dream nightly, and thus may act as gods,
creating worlds, or at least as artists, spinners of gossamer fictions with
such delicacy that they fall to pieces and vanish after the eyes have opened. This evidence of the fundamental human need
for narrative is reconfirmed daily by everyone’s experience, but there is no
more agreement about the best use for these products of the imagination than
for their cousins emerging from the more conscious areas of the brain, the
short stories in a literary quarterly.
Perhaps the
evanescent quality of dreams (in which way they contrast with the author’s
hopes of eternal life on the page at least) has a fortunate aspect. Though fascinating to the dreamer, laden with
significant detail and accompanied by urgent emotion, dreams generally cannot
survive retelling. There is little so boring
as someone else’s dream. Even great
writers like Anais Nin and Jack Kerouac cannot sustain reader’s interest in
unprocessed records of nighttime fantasies.
Yet dreams have such beguiling appeal to the dreamer that they seem as
though they surely must bear consequential information.
In Chaucer’s
“Nun’s Priest’s Tale” the rooster Chantecleer, deeply troubled by a dream,
groans, fearing, correctly, as it turns out, that his dream of a predator
presages an actual attack. His lady
Pertelote reproves him, saying “vanitee in sweven is.” She offers a physiological explanation,
suggesting that dreams arise from overeating, a notion she shares with Winsor
McKay whose comic strip Dream of the Rarebit Fiend was wholly composed
of nightmares occasioned by overindulgence.
A good medieval polemicist, the hen cites the authority of Cato who
discounted the significance of dreams.
More people over
the years have agreed with the rooster than with his consort. It is certainly the more stimulating and
productive position, though heavy dinners late at night may play their own
role. Very many around the world and
all through time have like Chanticleer thought dreams contain clues to future
events. The Bible is full of dream
interpreters of this sort.
In Genesis
Joseph no sooner says that interpreting dreams “belongs to God,” then he
offers to do the job himself. He
accurately decodes the dreams of his fellow prisoners, with nice symmetry
predicting that one will be freed and the other executed. Neither of the dreams, though, directly
portrays the destined outcome; through what Browne had called “symbolicall
adaptation” three branches must be read as three days and birds munching bread
as birds picking flesh from a corpse.
Thus, while dreams are considered to reveal the future, they do so only
indirectly, obliquely, symbolically, after the manner of art.
In a depiction of
Israel’s utopian future once the nation is properly observant, God promises not
only to defeat their military enemies (as well as a plague of locusts), but
also that “your old men shall dream dreams,” a promise repeated for Christians
in the account of Pentecost. Yet, in
spite of the potential of revelation, it is sometimes difficult to discern the
difference between God’s voice and a lie.
Jeremiah warns that false prophets may mislead the people declaring, “I
have dreamed.” After all, as Zecharaiah tells,
the priests of other deities also offer dream visions. “For the idols have spoken vanity, and the
diviners have seen a lie, and have told false dreams.” Islam likewise distinguished between the
divinely inspired true dream (al-ru’ya) and the false dream, which may
come from the devil, though many dreams are considered meaningless and
inconsequential (hulm).
The need for
acute discernment in the interpretation of dreams has led to professional
training in the skill by shamans and priests.
In many cultures the very dreaming of significant dreams is a task
undertaken by specialists. Not only have
psychedelics (called by some in this context entheogens) been useful for
vision-seekers, many cultures use psychotropic drugs specifically for the
purpose of achieving more lucid dreams.
For instance, the Chonal people of Oaxaca use Calea ternifolia,
called in English dream grass and the Xhosa people use Silene undulata,
or African dream root.
Belief in the
predictive value of dreams has withered in modern times, though it like
astrology survives in vulgar forms such as the pulp publication 1000 Dreams
and what they mean (1944), attributed to Yohanna ibn al Farmouzi, and the Gypsy's
Witch Dream Book of Numbers (1972).
The latter, in a sign of the decadence of the genre it shares with some
fortune cookies, reduces all dreams to numbers of interest only to
gamblers.
In recent times
the interpretation of dreams has turned from divination to psychology, or, to
use the mythic imagery of Freud’s Vergilian epigraph for The Interpretation
of Dreams, from the heavens to the underworld. Most moderns would assent to Freud’s
declaration that dreams are the royal road to the unconscious, though the use
of dreams in therapeutic practice has declined precipitously along with the
rest of the psychoanalytic system, in spite of the quondam assent of Freud’s
colleagues such as Jung who maintained, “who looks outside dreams; who looks
inside awakes.” Today, of course, a
psychiatrist, after having observed the patient’s general demeanor, is likely
to be primarily a prescriber of pills, leaving the talk therapy not to
psychologists, but to social workers.
The doctor may never hear a patient’s dream.
The revelation that narrative action in a literary text has occurred in a dream has been derided as too convenient a convention, yet it has honorably used by writers including Li Gongzuo in "A Lifetime in a Dream," Chaucer whose Book of the Duchess is built around two dreams, and Langland whose Piers Plowman has an even more elaborate dream architecture. Everyone knows of the sudden appearance of
the white rabbit in a waistcoat to Alice in her doze on the riverbank and of Dorothy’s
being carried off to Munchkin Country and eventually Oz before each young
heroine awakens again to everyday reality.
The device is used in a good many less-remembered works such as Fritz
Lang’s 1944 The Woman in the Window in which as in Oz some
characters from the waking world appear in dream roles. I consider the episode of Marge’s Little
Lulu outstanding in which Tubby is pleased when he rises from bed (in
dream) to find himself with a moustache but before his second awakening into
the security of his accustomed world, he finds himself pursued by an outraged
mob crying “little boys can’t have moustaches!”
Dreams may convey
an entire vision, a world-view. The most
celebrated dreamer of this sort is likely Zhuang Zhou who dreamed he was a
butterfly and, upon awakening, pondered whether he might not as likely be a
butterfly dreaming he was a man as a man who had dreamed he was a
butterfly. (Oddly, Socrates makes
exactly the same point in a passage clear and casual if more abstract and less
artful.) Such epistemological
questioning of reality seems to express skepticism like that of the
Pyrrhonists, but there is no equivalence between the insect and human
consciousness. During the dream Zhang
had been “flitting and fluttering about, happy with himself and doing as he
pleased,” whereas upon rising he fell to uneasy self-conscious cogitation. It is a smaller Fall from grace perhaps to
lose the wings of a butterfly than to be exiled from Eden, but the trajectory
is similar. From the wholly involved but
free participation in a natural spontaneous life such as we imagine animals to
experience we have descended to the neurotic human psyche, prey to guilt,
doubt, and self-questioning.
Liezi describes a
dream of the time the Yellow Emperor wore himself out with governing. He devoted himself to his duties and at the
same time indulged in sensual pleasures until, finding that his “ravaged flesh
darkened and his dulled senses were stupefied, he concluded that attachment to
himself and to the kingdom were both destructive. He went into retirement, neglecting matters
of state and living like an ascetic. At
this point he had a dream of the utopian land of Hua Hsü where people “have no
cravings and lusts.” There “all men follow their natural course” and they have
never heard of “profit and loss.” They
have thereby gained an extraordinary sensation of liberation, expressing by
Liezi as “the ability to ride space as though walking the solid earth.” This
same Yellow Emperor was said to appoint officials based on verbal clues in
dreams and to him was ascribed a book of dream interpretation.
My own dreams
seem rarely to rise to the economy and clarity, not to mention the
significance, of these dreams, but of course examples from written sources are
generally composed or literary dreams.
Even those reported by physicians such as Freud and Jung seem to many
critics to be artificially pruned to reinforce the author’s general
theories. I experience neither divine
openings nor the terror of nightmares.
Many times I have found myself in a semi-familiar area, a campus or a
city neighborhood having extraordinary difficulty making my way to my
destination. I turn a corner and see an
unexpected territory yet to be traversed or a make a short cut through a
university building only to find it a maze of corridors. I feel the mildest frustration. What can be the purpose of such a
fantasy? Having been student or instructor most of my
life, I have often found my dream persona unprepared sometimes for attending,
sometimes for teaching a class, though again without much anxiety. “Ah, well,” I would think, “I have three
papers due tomorrow, but two can be submitted late and it will be easy to do
the third tonight.” Or I would
improvise a lecture I could deliver without the students’ having read any
specific text. The mildness of my dreams
is consistent. I like many have also imagined
myself without pants or without clothes in public places, but others seem not
to notice. The unconscious is often
conceived as a roaring beast, but mine seems thoroughly domesticated.
On several
occasions, for months at a time, I have set out a notebook on the night table
to record my dreams and I have definitely observed that putting this sort of
conscious attention on dreams alters them considerably. They become far easier to recall, more
coherent, and more weighty with the meaning I sought. Probably the Lakota in a sweat lodge will
experience what he has been taught and what he has observed in the practice of
others. A Cameroonian educated in France
told me that a snake would visit him in the night to advise him. As a member of the snake clan it was no more
than he expected. Thus I am confident a
Freudian or a Jungian would rapidly acquire the knack of dreams congenial to
expectations.
It may be, in
fact, that our deepest sleep represents at once an unerring prediction of the future
and a philosophic cue. Decades ago the
Dalai Lama addressed the great American populace through People magazine
saying, in what is his most achievable suggestion if not the most lofty, “Sleep
is the best meditation.” The Vedanta
Hindu tradition identifies the waking state with the gross body and the
sleeping state with the subtle body. The
deeper sleep in which consciousness is eliminated altogether, the non-REM sleep
is identified with the absolute. (In the
familiar way of philosophic one-upmanship, some authors include a fourth state
as the final one, at once transcending and underlying the other three.) Thus samadhi, far from being a remote and
mysterious state of consciousness, is experienced by everyone nightly. While such emptiness may be the source and
end of everything, and indeed nirvana means “blown out, extinguished” it is
nonetheless far less engaging than the dreams that can dominate our attention
at one moment and vanish in a moment. Dreams
seem, like much of what we experience, to mean what we wish for them to mean.
Sources
Browne, “On Dreams;” Genesis 40:8, Joel 2:28,
Acts 2:17, Jeremiah 23:25, Zecharaiah 10:2; Gianluca Toro and
Benjamin Thomas, foreword by Jonathan Ott, Drugs of the Dreaming: Oneirogens:
Salvia divinorum and Other Dream-Enhancing Plants; Carl Jung, Letters; Plato,
Theaetetus; Zhuang Zhou, The Book of Lieh-tzu; Huangfu Mi, Records
of Emperors and Kings, Mandukya Upanishad.
