To sleep, perchance to dream…

There are so many theories about dreams and what they are. There are also just as many ideas about how to interpret them. Some scientists whom I have heard speak, have commented on the subject, and I think they tend to dismiss dreams as nothing but random discharges of the neurons and we simply ascribe a narrative to them and call it a dream. Frankly, I think that because there is so little that can be empirically verified, the dream experience is dismissed and not dealt with by a great many scientists. You can’t really verify what is in a dream. You can see that the brain is active during REM with an MRI and this is about all you can see. Only the dreamer can tell you what he or she dreamed. The MRI and neuroscience will never be able to verify the existence of a thought or a dream in terms of its content and process. One can only trust what the “observer” the thinker or dreamer says about it. And the observer’s subjective experience is practically worthless to a scientist.

What came first, I wonder, the thought or the neuron charge? Is the thought the result of the neurons discharging as the response to an external stimulus? I don’t think any credible scientist would say otherwise. But I do. The thought, the dream, and the unverifiable invisible person who had the thought, existed before the body or brain reacted to them and their initiative. Then the brain responded to the invisible “observer” and it lights up the MRI scan. The person has had a thought and the body has responded. We are all incarnate. We are all infleshed. But we are something else too. Our existence lies beyond the neurons.

What are dreams? Dreams are sometimes bereft of much meaning. But sometimes they are loaded with profound meaning. We all know this. A great truth or self-revelation lies just under the surface, down in what Freud and Jung first referred to as the subconscious or the unconscious. And it bubbles up to the surface in a dream. We sense meaning in it, we tell it to another who sees the obvious meaning and reflects it back to us. Then we have this epiphany—this revelation experience. We see the truth of the dream and it is often a relief to us.

I have begun to migrate away from the term “subconscious” and say only that there is something there—in the layers of our being--that is very mysterious and that we cannot understand in any scientific terms. There is a part of our self that remains beyond the brain. A self that doesn’t know the very language we use. Language is in the brain. It is mostly trapped in Broca’s area. But the part of the self that doesn’t know English has other means of communication to the infleshed self. This self has observed all that our eyes have seen and ears have heard, but which the brain is too limited in focus to catch. This aspect of our self does not have words but uses a language of image and metaphor. It uses the language of dreams. Dreams are a metaphorical language: series of images strung together in a narrative. That invisible part of us is using the substance of our daily experiences—things we didn’t see “consciously” we say, but that another part of our self picked up on it and sent it back to us in dream metaphor.

I am convinced that when we die and the brain goes, our learned language will go with it, but not the metaphorical language. It is a start—a beginning of a new, yet most ancient language from before the dawn of language itself. And I should say there is yet another language beyond the language of metaphor and that is the language of love. How do we find our way in the underworld? Understand Metaphor. Dante chose Virgil! A Poet! Who else knows the language of the heart? The Metaphor is the poet’s great tool. Let me then use poetry to develop my thought.

Here is yet another selection from Peter the Pirate that perhaps is a better way of stating what I’m after, than I can at this moment in an essay. Forgive a spoiler for a story you may likely never read. This section comes just after the death of Peter the Pirate:



From part 11: The Dreams that Come

Now what is death? And what is life?
And what is time and space?
It is a dream that we all share
A myth that we all chase.

And though life seems so very real
It is a metaphor;
A shadow of the bigger things
That hide behind death’s door.

And when we sleep we dream of things
Too hard to understand.
And harder still to keep those dreams
When daylight’s close at hand.

The things that made us weep at night
Vanish from the mind.
And little heed we give to them,
And to these dreams are blind.

And yet they speak to us, these dreams,
In a language we should learn.
That we should know the way to go
And which way not to turn.

Words we hold within our brains
And when we die they rot
But dreams come from the soul and so
We die, but they do not.

And so the dream of Peter lived
That language he did learn
And thus he knew which way to go
And on which path to turn.

And guides he had, that he knew well,
Who helped him on his way
His heart he had, and life he had
And beauty—that did stay.

Faith, and hope, and love he had
And there were several more
That helped him then through every gate
And every room and door.