Dreaming

It feels like, over the past few weeks, I have been spending the majority of my sleeping hours dreaming.
Yes, I know that physiologically, that is not possible, but everytime I wake up, it seems to be the end of the dream (I go into separate dreams with every hit of the snooze button), and I find myself recalling snippets of random dream memories all day long.

Coincentally (or maybe not), dreams have also come into play a great deal in my waking life lately, too. I have been reading some of Freud's case studies, which, by their very nature, rely heavily on dream analysis, as do those recounted in some of Yalom's case studies (side note- all you psyc folk and anyone else who just finds the human condition fascinating- you must read Yalom's Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy). Friends have been recounting intriguing and seemingly meaningful dreams to me, and I've been trying my hand more and more at a little amateur interpretation.

A little aside about dream interpretation... I have flipped through various opinions about what dreams are trying to communicate throughout my education. In high school, I would get out my massive tome of translations from a smattering of different theories, and quite literally assume the meaning from this book (e.g., forgetting where you parked your car is symbolic of an illicit affair). In the first few years of my university education, when I became quite the skeptic, I started to see the merit to more of a random activation approach, whereby random circuits are firing, and the brain forces a story onto them.

Now I take more of a moderate approach. I think anyone with any insight could not disagree that dreams are meaningful and communicative in their nature. However, I am dubious of the direct translation approach. While I haven't read much on the notion of the collective unconscious, I'm not sure that all humans are built with the unconscious device that automatically and universally converts thoughts of illicit affairs into dreams of losing one's car. I do think there are probably some cultural symbols that may be fairly universal-- e.g., our fear and awe of nudity in North America probably does lend some credence to the idea that the dream of being naked in public may reflect fear of exposure in the broader sense. However, I think the majority of dream symbolism is probably fairly unique to the person and their own experiences and thoughts.

Take, for instance, dreams of volcanoes, of which I had many in my childhood, and still frequently do. While dream dictionaries will tell you that this is because of a fear of emotionally exploding and the like, I am quite sure of a different meaning tied into a childhood comment by a friend. After I read about the devastation wrecked by Mount Vesuvius, she told me that every mountain whose name began with "Mount" was actually a volcano, whereas if its term ended in "Mountain", it was not. This comment actually had a fairly long term impact on me, such that when we went on family trips, I would look at maps frantically to see if we were driving anywhere near Mount Something, and would be tense the entire time we were in its vicinity. As such, I tie in a lot of my dreams about volcanoes to childhood anxieties, rather than emotional explosions.

Phew... more of a digression than I intended.
Anyways, lastly, last night I watched The Science of Sleep. Brilliant and cute film rife with dramatic dream imagery.


And last night I dreamt about death.
Specifically, the deaths of both the Duke and one of my very close friends. Their deaths seemingly switched between being interwined into one dream (they were in a car wreck) to being two separate dreams.
And I kept on waking up and consciously thinking that I was sick of being immersed in death, and going back to sleep and dreaming of more of it.
As the Duke pointed out earlier this week, and was also mentioned in the film last night, emotions are often maximized in dreams. These were some of the most emotional dreams I have ever had. I was absolutely overwrought with pain and distress. I was screaming, crying, feeling utterly out of control of any aspect of my life. It's actually almost a little painful to re-enact.

However, a few themes outside of misery also emerged. One being that which one is often faced with when deaths comes about-- and that is all the things that you leave unsaid in life due to trivial fears that you come to regret. Another being the importance of friendship. In real life, the friend who I dreamt of passing away, though not being a key player, was involved in some of the drama of the weekend. And in the dream, all of my close friends put their silly conflicts aside and came together to grieve. Also, a lot of the thoughts going through my mind in the dream were very similar to the very real thought I had that changed my perspective on life when I first lost someone who was close to me-- existential type of stuff.

This all feels too heavy for pre-coffee. I think I need to get a little sunshine and get away from contemplating the nature of death.