Brain Food #867: What we discover in dreams
"My dreams would often surprise me when 'I' couldn't"
A few days before his assassination on April 15, 1865, Abraham Lincoln had an uncannily prophetic dream, which he recounted to his friend Ward Hill Lamon. The dream was of his own death. He found himself inside the White House, in a ‘death-like stillness,’ and as he moved from room to room, he came across a funeral scene:
“Who is dead in the White House?’ I demanded of one of the soldiers, ‘The President,’ was his answer; ‘he was killed by an assassin.’ Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which woke me from my dream. I slept no more that night; and although it was only a dream, I have been strangely annoyed by it ever since.
Although the accuracy of this account has been questioned, which is often the case when there are only two witnesses and both have long been deceased, this is not the only example in history that illustrates the precognitive nature of dreams.
One of The Beatles’ most popular songs, Yesterday, came to Paul McCartney in a dream. As soon as he woke up, he turned to his piano and worked out the rest, though he was convinced the song already existed: “It’s gotta be something. And I couldn’t have written it ‘cause I just dreamed it.”
Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev had been trying, like many before him, to find a way to classify the chemical elements, until the final arrangement came to him in a dream, in the form of the periodic table:
“I saw in a dream a table where all elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper, only in one place did a correction later seem necessary.”
These are not necessarily supernatural occurrences. There are signs that we absorb in our waking lives that continue to be interpreted in a dream state. Researchers suggest that dreams manifest not only to help us process what happens during our days, but also to help us prepare our future responses to what we are dreaming about, a form of catharsis that ancient Greek tragedy first introduced. This doesn’t only happen with humans, but with other animals, too, like dogs, who scientists suspect dream of their owners, interactions with other dogs, and their daily experiences.
There are cases where the line between dreams and reality begins to blur. Frida Kahlo said, “I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.”
And, similarly, David Bowie:
“I suspect that dreams are an integral part of existence, with far more use for us than we've made of them... The fine line between the dream state and reality is at times, for me, quite grey.”
And there are examples of how dreams cross over into reality to change it.
In The Faraway Nearby, Rebecca Solnit recounts the story of how the Rapunui, the people of Easter Island, would once a year have a competition where a group of contestants would swim to a nearby isle to fetch the first tern egg of the season. The contestants were chosen by the local prophets, who saw who should compete in their dreams. An entirely made-up contest, with dreamed-up contestants, yet very real repercussions; those who lost drowned, fell off the cliff, or got eaten by sharks:
“We live in dreams;” Solnit writes, “we go into the shark-filled sea to carry them out; we make one egg of the sooty tern, also known as the wide-awake, into something to organize a whole society around. The tern’s egg is small, speckled, nondescript. The god who presided over all this was named MakeMake. “The things we dream up." wrote Annie. To become a maker is to make the world for others, not only the material world but the world of ideas that rules over the material world, the dreams we dream and inhabit together.”
There are the dreams of sleep and the dreams of wakefulness. How much should we listen to either? Had Lincoln not ignored his dream, he could have evaded death. Had Mendeleev ignored his dream, he would have missed a great scientific development. Countless creatives let their work be guided by their dreams.
Dreams, of course, tend to be disguised in symbols, their latent meaning requiring some further excavation. The equivalent of recognising our life’s dreams is what Steven Spielberg described as being able to hear their whispers:
“Dreams always come from behind you, not right between your eyes. It sneaks up on you. But when you have a dream, it doesn't often come at you screaming in your face, “This is who you are, this is what you must be for the rest of your life.” Sometimes a dream almost whispers. And I've always said to my kids, the hardest thing to listen to—your instincts, your human personal intuition—always whispers; it never shouts. Very hard to hear. So you have to every day of your lives be ready to hear what whispers in your ear; it very rarely shouts. And if you can listen to the whisper, and if it tickles your heart, and it's something you think you want to do for the rest of your life, then that is going to be what you do for the rest of your life, and we will benefit from everything you do.”
To dream has a dual meaning, for sleep and for wakefulness. When asked ‘what do you dream of?’ your answer will reveal what you pay the most attention to. You may dismiss the dreams of your sleep and focus on the waking ones. Both types can be compasses, revealing to us what we want:
“In our dreams, because of the artfulness of our censor, we can represent to ourselves - we can let ourselves know about - our forbidden desires.”
— Adam Phillips
What we try to push down is like a buoy we struggle to keep underwater; it will eventually find its way to the surface. Sometimes we do this because we are not ready to face something. Others, because we have no time.
The poet Alice Notley, who died last May at the age of 79, described her dreaming self as a better version of her waking one, free and able to come up with the unexpected: “Partly, it was clear to me that my dreaming self was better at some aspects of poetry writing than I, awake, was—my dreams would often surprise me when “I” couldn’t.”
Much like dreaming itself, she wrote in an unedited manner, and rarely changed her work, often ignoring pre-existing conventions about what poetry should be: “Dreams remind us that we can shape the world, that it doesn’t fit into the categories we tend to make for it […] All we do is dream; we live in poems and stories we invent.”
Carl Jung introduced the concepts of the archetypes and the symbolism of dreams, suggesting that some of these symbols come from our collective unconscious. What we tend to forget is that, despite recurring themes and images that can repeat themselves across people’s imaginations, our dreams are ultimately our own, private and known only to us. Even as we try to recollect them, as is also the case with memory, or telling a story, we inadvertently remake them. So dreaming becomes an act of creation, if only we pay attention to what we are seeing.
For Jung, those symbols lead us towards the path that awaits us. This perspective is not necessarily deterministic. We still have the choice of whether to follow or not, but maybe that choice is more of an obligation.
And with dreams of both kinds, we have to catch them before they are gone.
“Everybody’s had that experience, like having a conversation under the influence of something late at night. You reach a point where you seem to know something. And the next morning, it’s either absurd or you’ve forgotten it ... It was a little bit of an opening into something that was mysterious and tantalizing.”
— David Lynch
In Twin Peaks, a surreal murder mystery at its core, dreams play a major role in revealing clues to the characters, as well as the audience. In a scene from episode 2 of the first season, the local Sheriff, Harry Truman, asks the FBI agent, Dale Cooper, “The idea for this really came from a dream?” Cooper’s reply is simple, to the point, and potentially a little self-referential, since much of the inspiration for the show came to its creator, David Lynch, from the realm of dreams: “Yes, it did.”
