“An amazing number of ideas that shape our 20th century lives came first as inspirations in dreams. Philo T Fransworth dreamed the basic idea for t.v. When he was still a kid in high school. Elias Howe invented the sewing machine while trying to escape from cannibals in his nightmare. Albert Einstein first figured out the Theory of Relativity while riding downhill on his dream sled. Mohandas Ghandi had the brainstorm for the first religiously inspired general strike in India in a dream, to mention only a few.”
-Jeremy Taylor “Savoring the Rare Bits”, Introduction to “Rabid Eye – The Dream Art of Rick Veitch”
Henri Rousseau – The Sleeping Gypsy
Everybody dreams. Everybody. Even if you’re one of those people who thinks you don’t dream, you do. Even blind people dream. Even people in comas who later recovered report memories of dreaming while unconscious. Even animals dream. Just ask my dog. Ask her when she wakes up, because she’s currently laying on the real blue carpet on the real floor in the real bedroom twitching her paws, likely chasing a dream squirrel. She’ll probably never catch that squirrel in her dream, just as she never catches squirrels when awake.
Dreaming is a universal experience that spans time and culture. That may be why it’s so evocative when someone begins a story by saying, “I had the most curious dream last night…”
The average person dreams about two hours per night, with each dream lasting five to 20 minutes. That’s a whopping six to 24 dreams per night, on average. Women tend to recall dreams more frequently than men. Recording dreams immediately after waking helps to retain dream information.
One of the many interesting things about the dream world is, it offers new experiences. It allows you to see, feel, hear, taste, smell, and think about things differently than you do in your waking life. A dream can be a source for creative insights, a source for singular links.
The author Isabel Allende described how one of her dreams revealed how she should conclude her first novel The House of the Spirits. She had been struggling with the ending, and she had already re-written the last 15 pages more than ten times. One night around 3:00 a.m., she awoke from a dream in which her deceased grandfather was lying on his bed. “When I woke up from the dream, I realized that I had been telling this story to my grandfather all the time,” she told Naomi Epel in the bok Writers Dreaming. “The tone of the whole book was his voice and my voice talking… The dream gave me that.”
History brims with episodes of people waking from dreams with newly acquired information related to their waking-life projects. You yourself may have experienced such things, when pertinent information came to you in a dream.
I recently heard a story that the actor Mark Ruffalo heard a voice in his dream one night, and that voice told him, “You have a brain tumor.” That was odd. He didn’t have any symptoms but he somehow sensed that the information was true. Sure enough, a brain scan confirmed that it was true.
The topic raises so many intriguing questions. Where does dream information originate? Is it messaging from your subconscious mind trying to get the attention of your conscious mind? Is it just the random firing of ideas as your brain tries to metabolize all the stimuli you absorb in your daily life? Is it a revalation from a larger pool of human experience – a collective unconscious – of which you and I and all of us are a part?
These questions open doors to even more questions. Is dreaming involuntary or can you will yourself to dream? Can you seed or incubate your dreams with specific people, places or experiences (“candle-lit dinner with \*insert beautiful celebrity here\*”)? If you become aware that you are dreaming (aka, lucid dreaming), how much can you steer the narrative?
These are all juicy questions and here are some hypotheses to help answer them.
Hypothesis 1) Dreams are just random
In this explanation, dreams are just the flotsam and jetsam our your life’s experience. You could try to infer meaning from your dreams, but it would be the mental equivalent of spotting animal shapes in the clouds. Dreaming is like picking some random experiences out of a hat, and then asking an AI algorithm to stitch them together in the form of a story. No wonder dream stories evolve in outlandish Alice In Wonderland logic.
Neuroscientist Indra Viskontas says bizarre dream content is “just the result of your interpreter trying to create a story out of random neural signaling.”
Author James W Kaleb says, “[A] dream represents the brain’s effort to make sense of sparse and distorted information… The cortex combines this haphazard input with whatever other activity was already occurring and does its best to synthesize a story that makes sense of the information.”
If you believe that dreams are just random neurological firings, however, that doesn’t mean they are unimportant. I remember an episode from my childhood vacationing with my family in Mexico. We spent a kaleidoscopic day visiting the Mercado Libertad in Guadalajara with its kiosks of fresh-cut flowers, bolts of vivid woven textiles, pyramids of papaya and dragon fruit and prickly pear, restaurant cauldrons boiling with aromatic broths beside goat skulls sporting limes in their eye sockets, all unfolding to the perpetual one-two-three, one-to-three soundtrack of Mariachi music. That night I tossed and turned as dream after dream replayed the vibrant stimuli that had wormed its way into my mind. The subjects of my dream-movies were the subjects of my day-movies. The experience suggested the randomness of my dreams can potentially be seeded by the experiences in my waking life.
This is intriguing because it suggests that dreams can be guided or at least influenced by choices made in waking life. If you want to dream about the beach, spend time at the beach. If you want to dream about your deceased grandfather, pour over the memories your grandfather. Go through old photographs of him; talk to others about him; go to the place where you knew him; fetch objects that were personal to him. These exercises can conjure him into your dreams.
Hypothesis 2) Dreams are machines for self-regulation
This theory basically says dreams help you to assimilate the emotional content of your life. You go about your life moving from situation to situation, interacting with the world around you, funneling ideas, feeling amused, sad, excited, bored, tense, relaxed, bored some more… and all the while you are packing these experiences into some kind of cluttered storage room that can later be indexed thorugh your dreams.
Some say dreams alert you to important things that you did not acknowledge to be important when they first happened. You somehow overlooked their significance in the moment, and it is your dream experience that reintroduces you to them.
This theory suggests that your conscious mind needs assistance from some deeper intuition, like a hero needs a sidekick. I find this concept to be particularly rich because it offers its own paradigm for singular links: two independent influences (conscious and unconscious) converging to create new awareness.
Hypothesis 3) Dreams are messages from some larger human collective
This theory basically says dreams tune you into radio transmissions broadcasting _The Universal Human Theme Show_.
The implications of this theory, if true, are nothing short of astounding. You and I and all of us tend to think of ourselves as individuals whose lives are separate and distinct from the lives of others. But this hypothesis suggests that dreams allow you to share some consciousness with me, and I share with you, and we share with everyone else. If so, are your thoughts really your own unique thoughts, or are they just re-formations of some collective thought-stream that’s flowing through you?
A variation of this hypothesis involves dreams as channels to the divine. Tracing back to ancient times are countless stories of gods, prophets, angels, oracles, sorcerers and soothsayers appearing in dreams to deliver “The Ultimate Truth.” Even today, a google search for “dream messages from angels” yields 37.6 million results in 0.50 seconds. Try it for yourself. And be prepared to be fascinated.
If you are a researcher, writer, inventor or other individual whose livelihood depends on your ability to create original work, the “dreams reflect universal wisdom” theory should have massive appeal. It suggests that your dreams may provide new supplies of raw material. “Looking for singular links? Well, step right up to the Dream Theater and don’t forget to bring your notebook!”
Until then, dream on!