Hey, so here is me randomly brainstorming the significant of dream. It seems more like an self essay at first, but I'm later going to put this material into the first person point of view narrator which won't be and entirely reliable character. Please tell me what you think, because a lot of these ideas will be seen throughout the story and in some poems. I know there are some grammatical errors so if you like to point them out feel free.
What are Dreams? Are they simply complex messages from your subconscious mind? Like the humans’ personal thoughts and ideas trying to make sense of the real world? Or are they messages from an unknown Celestial being? Or in a more exhilarating approach, are dreams a temporary part of life in which the human spirit have left its body and enter into a world of the unknown. I like to think of it in that description. Depending on where a person’s psyches, values, desires, and virtues are, helps create this mysterious world in which nothing make logical sense, yet it always does in your dream. As if it’s reasonable if you’re killing little children or talking to pink unicorns. But because it’s only a dream and these events only occur in our nebulous moments, they are not real. We would like to believe they are, but they are not. No matter how genuine it felt or how strong it adapted itself into our unconscious emotions, it’s not real because we were told it wasn’t real, or in better terms not true. No one chased you with a machine saw; no one bake you a cake for the heck of it. It’s not true. It was just a dream.
Now if it was just a measly old dream, should we regard it as an advantageous fact, scientifically speaking, or should it be disregarded. And if dreams doesn’t enclose any significance, than why across the human race and across the web of time everyone seems to dream the same dream? Like falling or flying? It’s not like we humans have control over the dream. I never asked the ax murderer to chase me down Flatbush? Nor for my elementary teacher to feed me a bowl of insect likes raisins. However, we all can influence our dreams as we do with our life. Humans were never in control of their life. Technically speaking, we relapsed or advanced base on our actions, thoughts, values, and desires that influence the realm of the real world we live today. So if that’s the case, which we are not in charge or in control of our dreams, than who is? Is there a random slot in our brain playing different event like ideas so it can project in our subconscious mind? Or is it coming from a specific source channeling its message into our mind the only time our brains is at rest, or when our imagination is at rest. Hmm….the only time when humans have no power within their brains to say whether the message is right or wrong, when the stronger realm of our influence, the physical being, can’t intervene with the stolen images that interplays within our psyche. A specific source who knows this is the only time our mind is venerable to spiritual sagacity?
I think Karim is a spammer... but anyway...
ReplyDeleteThere's a lot going on here, and the ideas are compelling ones, but I wonder if you've tried to explore them in a more creative way? Rather than trying to spell them out in a logical/ linear sort of way? Is that the plan? Are you going to take these thoughts and ponder them through poetry or prose? Because of the non-linear and non-logical nature of dreams, I wonder if it's even possible to summon an idea of what a dream is, and what dreaming means, without using some creative medium (which are also always imperfect, but maybe better).
Have you considered creating a character that is your dreaming self? And writing as if you are that person? Maybe write from within the dream space, with a re-imagined logic and a differently understood sense of order. I read recently that our dreams are not linear- that we restore them to a familiar time-line "order" upon waking. Psychologists know this sort of thing because they can map brain activity and eye movement, and have found that it usually corresponds with events in our dreams, but rarely corresponds to the order that we describe dream events upon waking. In other words: if we dream that our brother is on the roof wearing a cape, and also that our brother falls and is sucked into the ground, these two events might occur at different times in the dream (and the falling might come before the being on the roof), but when we wake up we put them in a sensical order. But our eyes will have looked down to watch the falling (and our brain might have had a specific panic response) before our eyes looked upwards. Make sense?
The point of all that is- whether or not we are in control while sleeping- we immediately take control of the dream when we wake up. We restore a comfortable temporality and determinism to events ("my brother jumped from the roof and therefore fell") and also apply a logical reasoning ("my brother was wearing a cape and pretending to be Superman"). But what if you accepted the dream order and dream logic as-is? Or at least tried to- through a character?
I have always been fascinated by the nature and purpose of dreams, I think it's an awesome topic. I have had a lot of very unusual experiences in the dreaming arena, and I've heard lots of other accounts of folks who have claimed to have had precognitive phenomena from dreams. This can of course be disputed, except in my case, at least locally, because I made it a point to tell as many people as possible about the dream as soon as I could. four days later the dream came true and I and those I told were astonished. Of course, I don't know how I could have done anything about it, which really makes me wonder about why ~I~ had the dream.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, the essence of dreaming has been speculated about for a long time and is always a fascinating subject of the approach is right. I have written a lot of poetry myself about dreaming. Dream interpretation is another fascinating ability or skill. There are people who can listen to a dream and tell you what each part represents in "real life" and what's going to happen, so that might be an interesting angle for the power side of the dreaming issue. Dream interpretation has been a powerful divining ability even in biblical era with Joseph.
There is also a degree of self-fulfilling-prophesy going on too if one were to take close heed to their dreams and act accordingly. So it's hard to say whether dreams foretell the future or modify the behavior of the dreamer.
Some say it's the brain's way of resetting, but I don't know if I completely buy that. There are too many things happening with alpha and beta waves for it to actually be resting as it were.
I don't know, but I like the concept.
Evelyn,
ReplyDeleteFascinating to think about indeed. Before I get to mention it, do you mean "vulnerable" in the last sentence. It says "venerable to," so I'm not sure if that's the intended word or if you were meaning to say "vulnerable." I know you told us that this reads in a sort of 'self essay' form, but I'm curious to see how you will play with these ideas creatively. It is going to be a short fiction piece, or will you aim to convey your ideas through poetry?
I'm thinking about the nature of dreams, and one of the biggest things that stands out to me is that they are erratic. We often don't remember our dreams, the most random, fucked up things can happen in them. there is usually no rhyme or reason to a dream, so with a project like this, i think you ought to come up with a creative way to represent your perception of a dream. Maybe draw up a sort of muse? Have you decided for sure to use first-person narrative? Also, you said your narrator won't be entirely reliable--I am wondering who this narrator is, and why he/she won't be reliable. You may have these answers, but based on what you shared in that brief intro, it feels a bit vague to me.
I'm interested in the last part of your post about the brain. There is too much going on in the brain for the brain to be truly at rest. In its unconscious state, in the human brain, which has so much going on, how can we sufficiently, if at all, interpret the events of a dream? In addition to exploring what we can extract from dreams, explore what we cannot. With dreams, there is so much lost, so much not understood. Good ideas, keep fleshing them out.