Nobody ever wants to hear about my dreams.
-- Jason Isbell, "Chaos and Clothes"
I don't usually remember my dreams.
This is probably no great loss. I sometimes think I have great insights while drifting off to sleep at night but on a few occasions I've had the presence of mind to jot down these thoughts. When I read them over in the morning they were either banal or embarrassing. For better or worse, I do my best thinking when I'm alert. That's why I have coffee in the morning and whiskey after I finish a column.
On the other hand, there are people who would vehemently disagree with that. I had a great-aunt who was a follower of Edgar Cayce, the "sleeping prophet" who predicted, among thousands of other things. that the U.S. government would discover the death ray employed by the lost city of Atlantis in 1958 (maybe they did, maybe it's in Area 51 with the aliens) and that California would slide into the ocean (still could happen).
Cayce--who seems to have been a nice man who was only a little madder than my aunt and who did not have special access to any akashic record--thought anyone who did not remember their dreams was spiritually negligent. Cayce thought if you wanted to know God you had to pay attention to your dreams.
"And too oft, ye disregard them; or too seldom do ye pay any attention to them! They are parts of thy experience. How oft have ye visioned in symbol or in dream those very things that happened to thee later!" Cayce allegedly said during one of his dream-like readings, given when he was allegedly unconscious.
Maybe it's uncharitable to note that Cayce always claimed not to remember anything that happened during these readings.
In any case, I have learned my lesson about dreams; no one wants to hear about mine. Or yours either, by the way, as fascinating as you might find them. At least not our literal dreams, the rag-and-bone shadow plays our subconscious puts on in the dark. These are to be cherished, if you wish, and perhaps respected as potential messages from a Higher Power if that's your pleasure, but rarely if ever expressed out loud in mixed company.
Except now I guess the pandemic is giving us all weird dreams. Some people say we're sleeping more (not that I've noticed) and maybe we're turned a little more inward. Our structures have collapsed. We sit around all day, sometimes into the evening, in our soft pants staring at our blue light devices. We're bored.
It is producing a lot of free-floating anxiety so we have anxious dreams. Our routines have been disrupted, so we dream of being dislocated and unsure of what to do. The dreams I remember are straightforward. I am playing baseball and it is my turn to bat but for some reason--maybe the path from the on-deck circle to the batter's box turns to quicksand -- I cannot make it to the plate. Or I am playing golf but the tee box has turned into a phone booth and I cannot swing a club.
Less often I have everyone's dream about taking a final exam in a class I've never attended. Or I'm up on stage with a guitar, in the middle of a song I suddenly realize I have no idea how to play.
These are the sort of dreams I've always had; imposter syndrome dreams that probably have something to do with the molecular insecurity felt in waking life. Not bad dreams exactly, not nightmares, just typical dreams.
Maybe our dreams aren't so different, it's just that we're paying more attention to them.
And maybe Cayce was right, maybe we should.
No doubt they can be meaningful to the individual dreamer, who might intuitively know how to interpret them. Forget Freud; his metier was storytelling. The Interpretation of Dreams is semi-plagiarized pseudo-science that's far more interesting for what it tells us about Freud than what it might tell you about yourself or any of the neurotics he treated. No one knows what your dream snake means but you. Maybe.
Cayce didn't hesitate to interpret people's dreams for them either, but at least he always allowed that the dreamer was in the best position to say what a dream meant (if anything). I suppose our dreams could inform us of suppressed desires. Our subconscious might puzzle things out for us, that might be why it exists.
However, I'm skeptical about the existence of any universal set of symbols that apply across cultural boundaries. While there may be something to Jung's idea of a collective unconscious--there is probably a genetic component to our subconscious, not every reflex or instinct we harbor is the result of particular personal experience--all of us curate our own interior universes.
These people speak so authoritatively of how the mind works; I know that maps, however detailed, are not the thing itself and evidence of electrical activity means only that animal stirrings leave marks on the physical world. Certain parts of the brain respond to certain ordered stimuli; all mystery is reducible to chemistry. You can believe that if you want, if you're prepared to renounce the possibility of poetry.
All of us have memories, and unlike the faces we see in dreams, they are usually manufactured. Rarely are they as accurate or constant as we pretend they are. They are simply our way of explaining ourselves to ourselves, of figuring out how to live among the aliens who are other people. Another thing they say is that none of us are islands, but we are all locked within the prison of our own heads.
I don't know what happens when people die. The only time I see my father is in dreams, and while I know it would be easy to explain his persistence in terms of my own wishfulness and wants, I prefer not to think about it in that way. I see him now and then, and it makes me feel better about things. I don't think it odd that he is younger than I am now.
I don't find any aspect of my dreams odd while I am in them, which is one way I know I'm dreaming. Whenever I think about how strange things seem, I know I am wide awake.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 05/05/2020