Perchance To Dream

I am a dreamer. I come from a long line of dreamers on both sides of my family. When I'm in hard-core writing mode, my dreams are both reflections and instigators of what I write.

Unfortunately for me, I spent last weekend writing about the discovery of a body.

I spent the weekend researching decomposition from anaerobic and aerobic bacteria resulting in supification and purification, respectively. I wanted to know what it looked like, what it smelled like, and the minutest details of the affects of rainfall and acid soil on a body. I was up late at night viewing sites on adipocere. That makes for some weird dreaming. For a week I've been dreaming of bodies. A week.

One began, innocently, with a visit to some caves in Italy that had a fascinating display of fossils in their discovered states. The dream flight over was uneventful and the drive through the Italian countryside was beatific. I arrived at the site and entered an elevator that took me deep into the earth. It stopped at varying levels, depending on the fossils to be viewed. The floor I exited on must have been the "macabre" floor. I was quickly ushered into a room where the basic chemistry of forensic pathology was being taught. I was quite restless. As students played with their vials and watched the affects of one chemical upon another, I slipped out the back. My dreams almost always have a back door. On my own, I stumbled onto the preserved bodies of dinosaurs. There were two. Big whoop. I also stumbled upon animated corpses preserved at varying stages of decay and dissection. If you asked them, they would quite happily and meticulously describe how they arrived at the state they were in. There was an eviscerated gentleman hopping about on one foot and a lovely, long-haired woman with a massive tumor exposed from her flayed stomach. All of these people were smiling. They were all very friendly. I resolved, upon waking from that dream, to cut short my forensic research for a bit. Maybe break up the imagery I'd been burning into my brain with some nice flowers, or teddy bears. God, something else. So, what did I dream of after "depriving" myself of death images?

I went flying with Robin Williams. He taught me all the finer aspects of catching a good cross wind and landing in inclement weather. He was all in one piece. He was hairy. He was fully clothed. And, he was alive. Vast improvement. Why did my brain do this? Well, by golly I was determined to find out. I went back into research-mode.

There is a lot of information about dreams out there. Some of it is Freudian. Some of it is Jungian. Some of it is quite silly. And, believe me, I know silly. We're very well acquainted.

There are different kinds of dreaming. There are nightmares, night terrors, lucid dreaming, precognitive dreaming, healing dreams, quantitative dreaming and wet dreams. And, although dreaming is free, people are willing to charge a lot of money to tell you what those dreams mean. Quite nice of them. From fortune tellers to cognitive analysts to research foundations, there is a booming dream industry.

If you want to delve into dream interpretation, you'll find lots of silliness. The symbolic meaning behind dreams can be equally silly and quite archaic. Try it yourself at the following links:
http://www.sleeps.com/dictionary/dictionary.html and http://www.dreamdoctor.com/dictionary/

I dream about smoking cigarettes on odd occasions: "smoking a cigarette is a lucky omen. This dream denotes much prosperity and self-satisfaction for the dreamer." Unless, one is not a smoker. Then it's a bad omen - "Get a medical examination as soon as possible!" My doctor would love that reasoning.

My flying dream: "If you dream you are flying so high that you can actually touch the moon and stars this portends many different types of global disaster that you may soon hear of. If you fly high with black wings you are warned that you are headed for a let down of magnitude. Flying dreams are normally a good omen and if the flight is pleasant, with no worries and anxieties, you can look for happiness and plenty to follow."

Another site said of dream flying: "Flying with a guide in a dream is different though and it indicates that you have the ability to project your mind into the spirit world and communicate with spirits." Lucky me. Another says: "Metaphor of personal power in dreams. Flying to escape a pursuer suggests confidence in one's ability to avoid, or outmaneuver, fears and problems in our life. Difficulty gaining elevation (we have to "bounce" off the ground, or fly around obstacles), suggests doubts about our ability to reach a destination. Fears of landing reflect uncertainty about the future; we don't know "where we will land."

Dreams of soaring unfettered above the Earth reflect feelings of empowerment. We are confident in our ability to "reach any destination," and feel "on top of the world."" I am, apparently, quite the confident wench. Yeah, for me.

Let's try spiders: "All spiders except tarantulas are omens of good luck. If you see a spider climbing the wall you will have your dearest wish come true and if you see a spider spinning a web you will have an increase in your income due to hard work. A large spider sitting on a telephone shows you will have a phone call that will benefit you greatly. The larger the spider, the bigger the rewards." Tarantulas are not analyzed separately, for those seeking elucidation on that symbol. I think that is very silly. Can one man's spider be the same as another man's spider?

Dream symbols interpret symbol by symbol but they do not interpret the interaction with or the feelings toward the symbol. My dream spider was a cute and friendly little tyke that ended up bigger than the whole house. My sister's dream spider was icky and mean. In my dream there was mutual affection. In her dream, she was so overcome with fear, a dream Jennifer had to catch it. Dream Jennifer wouldn't kill it, though. She must be superstitious.

Studies done recently on the dreams of people with amnesia seem to suggest a meaning behind the dreams of everyone blessed with total recall. The study says people with amnesia that play the game Tetris, dreamed about the annoying little blocks falling, but couldn't remember actually playing the game. And, unlike people with recognition, their skills and scores did not improve.

Dr. Robert Stickgold, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School in Boston theorizes: "This shows that when the brain is filing away the memories it needs to keep, it has to go through a series of steps, and dreaming is a manifestation of one crucial step. Dreams are just the body's way of clearing out the mental "in-box."

"The trick is to move it to the file cabinet and to file it in the right place," Stickgold says. "A lot of REM (rapid eye-movement) dreams, those really quirky, strange, bizarre dreams that we have late at night, are the brain looking for ways to cross-index. It is looking for cross-references -- does this fit with this. Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't," he said. When it doesn't fit, the dream seems weird, he said. When the cross-reference is a good one, the brain can reinforce the memory.

"What these results, especially from the amnesiacs, tells us is that when the brain puts dreams together, it does it without knowledge of and access to memories of actual events in our life," Stickgold said. "We have two different memory systems. The hippocampal codes information on events from our lives. So when I ask you what did you have for breakfast, you go to the hippocampus for the answer," he added.

"A second system is the neocortical," he said, referring to another area of the brain. "So when I ask you when we go out for breakfast 'what do you like for breakfast?' that is a different type of question. When you go for that general information you go to neocortex. An amnesiac can tell you what they like for breakfast. They can't tell you what they had for breakfast."

This really dashes all the romanticism associated with dreams, doesn't it? Cross-referencing and electrical impulses, not prophecy and resolution. Is it possible that something that can affect us so profoundly is a mere firing of a few synapses? Or, is that just the physical reality behind an experience of the soul? Are dreams the great quantifiers of our existence? A map to the inner recesses of our hearts and minds? An internal movie playing out our fears and hopes? At the very least, they are the beginning and the end to our day. For me, they are fleeting images that need to be written down or painted as soon as possible. For a rare few, they are the preamble to a personal manifesto that, when lived out, can change the lives of many. As Edna O'Brien said - "in dream begins responsibilities.*"

"Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top."
-- Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

"Maybe the wildest dreams are but the needful preludes of the truth."
-- Alfred Lord Tennyson

"Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top."
-- Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)
"Maybe the wildest dreams are but the needful preludes of the truth."
-- Alfred Lord Tennyson

*Bono did not come up with that piece of wisdom. Nor did he come up with:
"A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." That was Gloria Steinam