Dreams

 We have come to regard our awakening state as the state of existence where reason and rationality prevail, and if we can not touch it, explain it, predict it and hopefully control it then it does not have meaning.  This is strange because when one reflects on the fact that we sleep on average, eight hours a night sleeping, that we spend roughly one third of our lives sleeping, and that twenty to twenty five percent of our sleeping time is spent dreaming.  If this is true then how come some people think that dreams are not real.  If we think for a moment that images are not what one sees, but a way of seeing, then to see imaginatively, what a dream does, is to see resemblances of things, people or events.  As Peter O’Connor says, “The stuff of dreams are not unreal… they are another reality an ‘as if’ reality”. (P 75)

There are no limits when dreaming.  Dreamland is fantasy, fiction and invention.  We seemingly cannot control the dream world. Given then the dream world violates our preferred notions of reality.  Every night we are subject to another reality, another form of existence, where we invent stories, some about people, places and things we know from our awakening reality.  When dreaming we ignore the usual restraints of space and time.  We alter reality when sleeping.  We can manipulate the size and age of someone we know or we could find ourselves doing two totally contradictory things at the same time. 

Our problem is, as Erich Fromm so adequately states, “That symbolic language, the language of dreams, has been forgotten by modern man.  Not when he is asleep, but when he is awake… By forgetting the symbolic language, he is disconnected from his own plot and thus vulnerable to living out others’ pre-formed, stereotyped, and pre-packaged myths or plots.  In so doing, he is turning his back on his own individuality and, ironically, on his depth of being, which inhibits his awareness of others’ individualities.” (O’Connor P 45)  Dreaming is the most natural, obvious, and readily accessible means for remembering a symbolic language.  Since imagination can be seen as breath to psyche in the same vital way as oxygen is to the body, thus dreams are essential to life.  As the medieval author Synesius of Cyrene states, “Sleep offers itself to all: it is an oracle always ready to be our infallible and silent counselor.” (O’Connor P 5)