Somnovisions

Here’s my problem: I’m a dish sponge trying to be a car-wash sponge. There is so much I want to read, so much I want to write, so much I want to learn, and so little time to do it. I want to be able to absorb life faster, or to absorb more knowledge each time I soak myself in words, but there are temporal as well as physical limitations to the extent of one’s education. This is where my Literary ADD comes into play: I want to read every book, and read them all right now. I order books from Amazon about twenty times faster than I can read them. I often lament that as a human being I must give those mesonoxian hours to Morpheus which otherwise could be spent reading and writing. It is a mutual transaction, however, for Morpheus gives back to me those eccentric stories of myself and those wild visions which we call dreams.

I find that writing down my dreams helps me to remember them far more often when I wake up. Before I made a habit of scribbling down the ‘plots’ in a notebook, I would seldom recall my dreams, except when their utter singularity had stamped a burning impression on my mind, or when some object, word, or semblance in real life triggered a subconscious memory relapse hours, or sometimes days, later. I begin to wonder if dreams have meaning, or if they are merely the result of the brain ‘doodling in the margins.’ I don’t subscribe to the popular notion that dreams are capable of portending future events: time travel is impossible because time is an invented concept, not a ‘location.’ A time line is simply there to help us relate the past to the present and the present to the future — it is not a map, and none of the points, save for an infinitesimally small one at the present, exist.

But the question of underlying meaning in dreams is perhaps one we will never answer. There are hundreds of theories out there, and even dream interpretation books and websites that scrutinize each salient element of the dream and relate it somehow to a real-life concept, fear, emotion, or object. I can’t say one way or another whether these are correct. What I can say, however, is that whatever images the mind conjures during sleep certainly retain the same connotations to the dreamer as they do in waking life. The brain develops relativity of concepts, images, words, etc. through a massive network of neuron connections, which is a physical structure that is not altered during sleep. Therefore it is safe to say that, in the strictest sense, the objects one sees in a dream represent the same thing they do in the subconscious as in the conscious mind. Someone who is intimidated by authority figures will connect policemen, soldiers, etc. with a certain level of fear; in dreams these figures still carry the intimidations they impose by day.

Does one dreaming about authority conjure images of these familiar instantiations, or does the dream originate with an authority figure and automatically arouse emotions of fear? Moreover, what exactly causes one to dream about one topic or another? Do the thoughts and emotions from a day’s work transfer to the world of the subconscious? Do subconscious thoughts by day give rise to sub-subconscious thoughts by night? And does the mind really hold the power to warn itself against itself — in other words, can it analyze its own faults and present them in a parable? I’m not reluctant to latch onto this belief, which dream analysts try to understand — the human mind is an astonishingly powerful, and equally mysterious, entity. But why would such a powerful machine as a human mind dissect its scruples in the dark?