"There couldn't
be a society of people who didn't dream. They'd be dead in two
weeks." -- William S. Burroughs
“Love is an attempt to change a piece
of a dream-world into reality.” -- Henry David Thoreau
“You see things; and you say 'Why?'
But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?'” -- George
Bernard Shaw
“I think we dream so we don't have to
be apart so long; if we're in each other's dreams, we can be together
all the time.” -- Hobbes, Calvin
and Hobbes
"I
am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I
have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me
profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a
fleeting image in the moving water." -- Eugene Ionesco
“I
dream, therefore I exist.” -- J. August Strindberg
"I've
dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and
changed my ideas; they've gone through and through me, like wine
through water, and altered the color of my mind. By now I can say
they were an absolute waste of time." -- Jerry Langford*
* * *
I'm
not entirely certain why I decided to start a dream journal. Perhaps
it's because I've recommended, for no good reason that I can think of
off hand, that my students keep one. Perhaps it's because I have
had, over my many, many years of dreaming (let's say 31, shall we?
Yes, 31) many, many interesting dreams; unfortunately, because I
didn't keep a dream journal, I can only remember a few of them.
There
was this recurring dream I used to have about a flooded landscape and
collapsing bridges. This was pre-Katrina and
pre-that-bridge-collapsing in Minnesota, so it was probably inspired
by some of the rickety wooden bridges we used to cross in Northern
Missouri when I was a kid.
When
I was very young, there was also a series of dreams involving a
critter I called “Evil Big Bird.” He looked like an anorexic,
wicked-beaked, green version of his Sesame
Street
antithesis. During storms, Evil Big Bird would run around the house,
and each time he passed the wire that brought in electricity, the
lights would go out. On occasion, he would also pull me into the
cracks between the cushions of the couch, kinda like how the
seriously disturbed clown, Pennywise, pulled kids into storm drains
in Stephen King's It
(but
I was having the Evil Big Bird dreams long before I started reading
King).
I've
also had several dreams involving “The Girl.” I don't know who
The Girl is, was, or represents, but I'm pretty sure that my ex-wife
was jealous of her now and again.
Besides
those few, though, there aren't a lot of the what surely must be
thousands of dreams I've had over the nights that I can remember.
Since I'm a writer by inclination, it seemed silly to be wasting
those plot/image possibilities.
Other
writers have set their dreams down in journals, using them as maps
for their fiction or as insight into their own subconscious. Jack
Kerouac published his Book
of Dreams
in 1961. Graham Greene's A
World of My Own: A Dream Diary
was published in 1992. Some of Franz Kafka's dreams were compiled
and published in 1993 in a book whose name in German I don't even
want to try to spell here, let alone try and pronounce in public.
And Federico Fellini's The
Book of Dreams
was just published in 2008 (yeah, I know Fellini was a director, but
directors can be writers, too). Among others.
The
key to keeping a dream journal is to keep it nearby the bed, or the
cot, or the hammock in the back yard, or (if one is on the outs with
one's significant other because one is dreaming about The Girl) the
couch. Wherever the dreaming is going on. Dreams don't last long
after waking up. The conscious mind tries to make sense of them, and
by trying to put them into logical frameworks, TV-inspired plot
lines, and sensible order the dream logic is lost and the dream
itself fades. In about forty-five seconds.
But
now I've run into a problem. When I first started this dream
journal, I would wake up at my usual time, roll over, grab the
notebook I'd chosen for the project (a leather-bound book I'd
earmarked for something or another that I never got around to doing)
and started writing. Bleary-eyed, uncoordinated, half-unconscious --
the perfect time to write down the essentials of the dreams I'd had
the previous night.
The
most recent dreams were the most vivid, of course. I wrote those
down first, then worked my way backwards through the night.
Here's
the issue: now my subconscious doesn't want to lose those earlier
dreams, so I've started waking up at 3:00 AM with the near
irresistible urge to record them RIGHT NOW! This is an urge I must
suppress, 'cause otherwise I'll, well, wake up at 3:00 AM and not be
able to go back to sleep.
Anyway,
here's the breakdown. In the nine days and twenty-two dreams I've
recorded since I started, I've discovered:
That
apparently I'm concerned about someone stealing the bushes in front
of my house.
That
I'm heavily-influenced by the books I've been reading or the TV shows
I've been watching (including a short story I read in Fantasy
& Science Fiction Magazine,
a mystery novel about an odd invention, and an episode of Mystery
Science Theater 3000).
That
I apparently, on occasion, have dreams about a 50-foot-tall Jessica
Beal.
And
I seem to dream about trains a lot. This could be because a track
runs close enough to my house that I can hear the train whistle in
the middle of the night.
But
waking up at 3:00 AM to record some of these?
NOT
one of my dreams.
* * *
"Once
upon a time, I, Chuang-tzu, dreamt I was a butterfly, flittering
hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly...
suddenly I awoke... Now I do not know whether I was then a man
dreaming I a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am
a man." --
Chuang-tzu
"Some
say dreams are poetry. Some say that dreaming is an art. But we all
dream and we aren't all artists. I say dreams are the eyes of our
mind. These eyes start to see when we switch off the light before we
go to sleep. A time of trial and retribution. If only we could
reconcile ourselves with our dreams, then maybe, maybe this world
would become a better place to live in.” -- Genevieve Bouris
"Why
does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination
when awake?" -- Leonardo da Vinci
"Sleep
hath it's own world, - And a wide realm of wild reality. - And dreams
in their development have breath, - And tears, and tortures, and the
touch of joy." -- Lord Byron
"If
dreams are so important, then why do I wake up all the time?" --
S.W. Clemm*
*Quotes
courtesy of the Dream
Exploratorium.(http://www.xs4all.nl/~cuckoo/TDE/drquotes.html)
and the Internet (motto: Turning Dreams into Stock Options and then
Bankruptcy Since 1994).