If Dreams Are Thoughts…

…and that is what I think they mostly are, dangers arise because the contents of dreams have a distinctly objective feel. By this I mean that as we dream we never doubt the reality of the projection we experience, even when the dream performs amazing jumps. The dream reporter will then say: “The next thing you know, I was looking at a river…” but such abrupt transitions are accepted. And when we become aware of the dream’s strangeness—or real thought is required for some aspect of it—we wake up.

The danger lies in misunderstanding certain dreams as messages—not from our own thoughts but from some mysterious beyond. Most dreams are just a streaming of associative thought rendered as dynamic images. To be sure the thoughts of some, asleep as well as when awake, are circling around arcane subjects that, rendered in dream imagery, produce fantastic visions. The skill of the sleeping mind in producing visual renditions of abstraction is quite admirable as well as occasionally clumsy and amusing—once understood. Alongside dangers are boons. Sometimes we solve problems in our dreams. A famous example of such a boon was Friedrich Kekulé’s vision of a serpent biting its own tail, which came to him in a revery and helped him understand the structure of benzene, a subject that had long plagued him.

The absence of genuine consciousness in dreams—meaning detached self-awareness—is the most interesting aspect of ordinary dreaming. We appear to experience dreams as if we were embodied presences in them, but altogether absent is even a hint of how we would react if we were really present. If now as I am sitting in my backyard writing in the sun I would be suddenly at the airport waiting at a gate, I would certainly immediately feel that something was drastically wrong. But if this thought recurred in a dream, I would be at the airport; and, at that airport, all kinds of signs, elaborately realistic, would signal some kind of trouble.

These thoughts arise because, recently, I was revisiting Carl Jung’s conceptualization of the Unconscious, a realm peopled by archetypes. That theory arises from dream analysis. And it occurred to me then that unconsciousness is the chief marker of the dreamer; the dream itself is usually accessible enough. The really weird dreams are those in which we dream the future—and, sure enough, a short while later the dream event actually happens. But if a person dreams that God has told him to do this or that, a little cold water splashed on the face will not be out of place.

Now as for lucid dreaming, on that subject I have only hear-say. I know what “lucid” means in the waking state. I’d have to experience a lucid dream before I could judge. Some people might consider lucid what I do not. There is nothing like tasting for yourself.