Beautiful Bassett Hound and Really Big Lobster

In my dream I was outside, in a public place. There were no buildings. I saw a few trees in planters. A man stood talking to a group of people. I was one of them. We sat on rock benches and I felt I was in a class. The man talking was a teacher, a Socrates like character. I see the last page of a book. The teacher asks us about the last scene of a book. I’m only vaguely aware of the title of the book, but throughout the dream I struggle to grasp the title. Eventually my confused mind labels it The Great Gatsby. I turn to the back of the book and read the last scene.

“Hey, I don’t remember this scene, and I’ve read this book three times!” I exclaim without hearing my voice. There are only a handful of students around the teacher and we’re all quiet. The teacher pushes us for an answer again. I make a suggestion that I know is wrong and stupid as soon as I say it and the teacher gives some wise reply that shoots me down. In the dream it almost feels like I’m saying real words, or even reading real words, but really it’s only vague concepts and squiggles that look like words. Communicating in dreams is like telepathy.

I can tell there are two characters in the scene. I reread the scene again. For some reason an image of a giant lobster interrupts the dream and I flash on this idea. “One of the characters in the scene is God.” The teacher agrees and the other students start talking excitedly. I study and study the scene but can’t figure out what’s happening. Has a character died and gone to heaven and is talking to God? Or has God come down into the world to tell him something?

Then I have an image of a beautiful bassett hound running, with its huge floppy ears flying around its head. I don’t connect any meaning and all I feel is the desire to buy a bassett hound – could this be a form of subliminal advertising? Then I return to the outdoor classroom and struggle to make something out of the last scene again. We all make suggestions but the teacher isn’t happy but I feel somewhat pleased that I discovered that the mysterious character was God. The dream fades away and I awake.

It’s fascinating to play amateur scientist and try to discover how dreams work. I think there is a mind that experiences dreams that is different from the mind of the waking me. I call it the narrator. This narrator may be a mechanism that the waking me also uses, but I see “the me” of dreams separate from “the me” who is writing this. When you are in a semi-wakeful state you can observe this narrator in action. Random images will appear and bits of meaning will pop into your mind. Dreams appear to be built on a series of still images or crude moving images that the narrator comments on. The narrator makes up meaning for the images. The dream me acts on those suggested meanings.

Take for instance the dream above. I saw a man standing and with a handful of people sitting around him. The narrator informs me without words, “a teacher and his students.” That image could have been anything. The narrator sees the last page of a book and supplies, “the teacher wants to know the meaning of the last scene in the book.” The sleeping me, that is the mechanism of self-awareness, is very dormant but I relate to one of the students. The “me” in the dream isn’t aware of the narrator – it experiences the series of images and thoughts the narrator provides as a whole story.

On rare ocassions I’ve had vivid dreams where the waking “me” is the dream “me.” However, it’s an illusion. If the waking “me” tries to guide the dream it will destroy the dream. The sleeping “me” is passive and must watch the dream like a movie. If the “waking me” tries to think and override the narrator, the dream will fall apart and I’ll awake.

I think the narrator mechanism works in waking life too. If you are at a restaurant and see a young couple sit down nearby, the narrator might tell you, “See that couple, they are on their first date. See how they act nervous…” The narrator can be very convincing, even to the point where you believe it and think what you are seeing is real. This is why cops say they saw a gun when they didn’t. The narrator can see something and tell the cop it’s a gun. The narrator can be very powerful. The narrator thinks much faster than normal self-aware thinking.

Usually dreams relate to the previous days events, but the above dream doesn’t remind me of anything that happened yesterday. I was an English major in college, so the dream does make sense to me. I’m used to trying to figure out what books mean. I’m used to the anxiety of having a professor put pressure on a class to supply an answer. The Great Gatsby is a book that is taught a lot, and last week I read an article suggesting it was the great American novel. I have no idea why the lobster and bassett hound popped into the dream, but the narrator quickly used the one image and made it fit into the story. Maybe if the bassett hound would have stayed long enough the narrator would have made up a new story for the dreamer, a new dream.

Fiction and story telling seem to be at the heart of our minds. We look out at the world and see trees and mountains. It doesn’t take long before we’re making up stories about fairies living the in the trees and gods living on the mountains. Zen masters try to break their students of this habit – to see the world as it is without the stories, but that’s a very hard habit to break. Think of the war in Iraq. Imagine all the stories created by all sides of the conflict. Just think, the Sunnis and the Shiites are killing each other over stories made up thirteen centuries ago. It’s no wonder that some people believe that even our waking real world is a dream, a nightmare.

And finally, at a meta-level, notice how I can take tiny events in my life and turn them into a narrative structure. Observe the narrator.

Heaven, Hell, and the Other Places

I died in my dreams last night. No biggie, I’ve died in my dreams several times over the years. Dying in dreamland is intense. Yesterday I was having some minor heart trouble and last night I dreamed my heart stopped. I felt myself falling. My last thought was, “Here I go” with a sense of complete acceptance, and I let go. All details around me fell away, and the final thing I was aware of was a dull gray light. Everything stopped. That’s when I woke up. It was quite a relief to wake up and be alive. I love being alive.

Dreamland is such a strange place. I’ve died before, and once came to, floating up towards heaven before waking up. My cousins and I had been riding in the back of a station wagon and we were hit by another car with a tremendous bang. Then blackness. Going to heaven was the scariest dream I ever had. I think it was my first time to die in a dream. I’ve since died a few times from endlessly falling into hell. It’s easier to die the atheist’s death where I collapse into black nothingness. It’s always a trauma to survive death and come to in again, and still be in dreamland. Sometimes the shift is to a pleasant new life but the transition is scary. Other times its overhelming and I wake up in a sweat and panic. Then there are times when I come to and I’m living again on another world or in another life. I don’t believe any of these events have real relationship with reality, but I can see how lots of wild ideas got started in the real world over the centuries.

On these other worlds I’ve been flying creatures, swimming creatures and tree swinging creatures. I’ve always assume my brain created these roles for me because I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy. I remember one time dying and ending up in bed with an attractive matronly woman in her sixties, whom I eventually realized was God. Now that was unnerving. What would Freud have made of that? I was over fifty at the time, but I still wonder if God had any age of consent laws to deal with. She had been jolly, warm and caring and when I woke up, I was reminded of when I was a kid and how I felt about big soft grandmotherly women with ample bosoms.

I wonder how many concepts have come into the world from dreams. Reincarnation feels like an idea generated by dreamland. Did people think of talking animals before they dreamed of them? I remember a beautiful dream of being a part of a troop of monkeys, and being in love with a girl monkey. I never knew if we were Earthly monkeys, or monkey-like creatures living on another world. Did we imagine aliens living on other worlds or did our dreams paint those sense of wonder creatures in our mind. I tend to believe that all mysticism comes from dreams or hallicinations, which to me are dreams that leak out into the waking world. Primative people talk much of dreamtime.

I am reminded of a title of a book about Philip K. Dick – “What If Our World Is Their Heaven.” I’ve been to many heavens and hells, to many alien worlds, in my dreams, and I’ve never visited a world that could top our world no matter how wild my imagination got. If there is a heaven, it is this world.

Dreaming and Fiction

Some scientists suggest that dreams are a side effect of your brain’s processing of daily memories.  Others compare dreams to jumbled thoughts of an unconscious mind.  This reminds me of studies done on people put into sensory deprivation tanks where they would hallucinate.  Are dreams just unconscious hallucinations?   I’m also reminded of several brain books I read this year that suggest that our conscious mind might not be the only mind in the brain.  I don’t know what dreams are, but my dreams are sometimes very weird.

In recent years, since I’ve been studying fiction, I’ve notice that my dreams sometimes have the structure of fiction – they tell a story with an involved plot and are more than random events.  Last night’s dream was one of these.  In this dream I was part of a group of people that for some reason beyond our knowledge was forced out of our normal reality into another universe.   The group, maybe thirty people, were scattered in this new reality and we all struggled to understand what was happening.  The whole dream was intense and I woke up a couple times during the dreaming – which is probably why I remember some of it.

In this other reality there were powerful beings that watched people.  If these beings were around people had to cower, bow or hide from their sight.  I was with a woman from our universe and we wanted to escape this new reality, so we always ran from these beings.  We didn’t like being watched, but the local people from the new reality accepted their position without fear or question.  The reason I say my dreams use forms of fiction in their telling was the point of view shifted.  Sometimes I was the woman.  Sometimes I was watching the other people in other places trying to cope with the new reality but I wasn’t one of them.  Who I was in the dreams shifted several times.  This is like the authorial omniscient point of view.  After awhile the group started finding each other and we began planning our escape.  We wanted to find out how to get back to our reality.  This is like a plot.  One of our group, suggested a theory that we might not be able to get back to where we came from but might be able to move on to another reality, one without the watching beings.

We didn’t know how to shift reality.  In the dreams we were always running trying to find the edge of the world, or the top of buildings.  For some reason the edge of things were important.  At one point I discovered how to fly and I and my woman companion started flying away.  Then some of the others started flying with us and we flew to the end of the sky and broke into a new universe.  We were all scared by the new world, but I don’t remember why.  That’s when the dream ended.

I’ve had other dreams I wished I had written down because they were so well plotted that I thought I could turn them into a short story.  When we dream our bodies are shut down and we’re cut off from our senses.  I wonder if self-awareness or our conscious mind still functions in this sensory deprived state and needs to make sense of internal images.  Or is there another proto-mind in our brain, one that doesn’t have our identity, capable of taking on any identity, which is a universal character looking for a plot.  I’ve often wondered why we spend so much of our lives involved with fiction, either from reading books, watching television, movies and plays, daydreaming, playing role based games, etc.   Could it be we have a built in mechanism for creating fiction?

I tend to think animal minds don’t have this fiction mechanism.  I think animal awareness is of the “be here now” kind, and when they dream they see scenes of reality without fictional components.  I have always believed that self-awareness is dependent on language.  We divide reality up into parts and give each part a label and the side affect of that is the knowledge of that there is me and the rest of reality.  I think this fictional mechanism that exists within the brain is a mechanism for speculation, where it pictures me doing things other than being in the immediate reality.

For example, when we are young and want to go out on a date, we imagine a lot of possible date scenarios before we ever go out on a real date.  In the animal world, a male elephant would not think about a female elephant before he met her.  With elephants dating is running into another elephant unplanned, touching each other with their trunks and depending on other forces of biology, mating.  I don’t think male elephants sit around and imagine their version of babe elephants with long twisty trunks.

I wonder if this internal speculation brain function, combined with the sensory deprivation state of sleep, builds stories out of whatever images pop up in its view.  I also wonder if my speculation function has been beefed up because I study fiction and writing.

Do dreams mean anything?  I don’t know.  Does this dream of mine mean anything?  Well, I can tell you I’ve been reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and I’ve been thinking about religion.  When I think about religion I think about angels, gods and dead people watching me.  I find the thought of this otherworldly spying very creepy.  That could explain my dream.