Here's why I don't believe that dreams are portents sent from some outside entity to forewarn of present or future events.
The content, intensity and memorability of my dreams is heavily based on what I've been thinking about over the past month, whether or not I'm on medication, and what I've eaten that evening. In other words, my dreams are made up of my inner life. To me, this signals something that can have direct bearing only on that inner life, and can go further only via my choices.
Last night, I dreamed (among other dreams) that G, K and I went on a jaunt to Paris, secure in the knowledge of having rented an apartment from somebody that G knew. When we arrived, we realized none of us had thought to google the place to find out where it was. All we knew, collectively, was that it was in Paris, and that it had an address on rue Ste-Bernadette. No problem right? We'll just poke around town til we find it? D'oh.
So we started asking people -- Ou se trouve rue Ste-Bernadette? -- Euhhh... je ne connais pas rue Ste-Bernadette... So we started looking in the phone books... no such of a road. The apartment could not have existed, we had been had!
(Incidentally, I have since googled it, and found that indeed, there is no rue Ste-Bernadette in Paris, though there is a place Ste-Bernadette in a nearby suburb. So there you go.)
As I drifted toward wakefulness, I was still pondering the possibilities for moving forward -- perhaps I could get a job tutoring English to teens wanting to go abroad, or French to ex-pats and tourists, to support my sisters and I while we tried to eke out food and lodgings and entertainment during our stay...
I found the dream slightly disconcerting in its verisimilitude (colour, reality of character, intensity of real life, plausibility), but all of the elements can easily be traced back to things I know and frequently think about. I have no worry that I will soon embark on a botched overseas trip. If you know me, you know I wouldn't budge without personally knowing exactly where I was going first.
I've never believed in dreams as a hard and fast set of symbols that are universal to everyone, or even to a given cultural set, and I've never really understood the thinking that says that they are. I think the dreams of an individual have unique representations for the individual and any commonality can only be owing to the experiences and imagery that any set of people may happen to have in common. No matter what else is true, I believe that dreams are built from whatever is within the person, and if a given person does not have a deep-seated idea of, for example, a voyage as something that represents an inheritance (or, in my case, a disastrous voyage that represents incompetence and false loves), then I don't believe that such a dream can possibly represent those things for that person.
This is not to say that I don't believe dreams can have meaning, or that they can sometimes reveal shocking things to people. I think dreams can be a medium to reveal truths that may be within a person's sensory grasp but outside of their ability to effectively process. That is to say, I think dreams are exclusively a way for the self to communicate with the self, but that information gleaned from unconventional information (i.e. ESP) could find its way to a person's understanding through dreams. You might have a momentary bad feeling when all seems well, but through a dream realize that something bad is happening so far away that you could not have perceived it through the regular sensory channels.
However, I don't believe that this particular dream -- or last night's other dream where my aunts were secretly hosting a family event that would effectively sabotage another aunt's annual family gathering unbeknownst to her -- has any sort of implication beyond the idle musings and overfed turmoil of my anxious and creative brain. Though maybe I will email my aunts, just to make sure.
No comments:
Post a Comment