Speaking of Dreams

...paying attention to our inner lives...

Photo Cliff Scholz

It’s a common experience that if we speak or write down our dreams upon awakening, we’re much more likely to remember them. Whether spoken or written, translating the inner world of our dreams into words that we can hear or read and maybe even share with others gives those dreams an anchor point in our everyday experience.

My guess is, if we really want to explore our dreams, having more anchor points is better. It’s helpful to speak a dream, yes. But to both speak and write it is most likely better. If drawings or other expressions can  support that, that’s even better still. And building habit patterns around all this further strengthens these inner connections — keeping a dream journal, for example. Lastly, creating social context for the sharing of dreams can help a lot, too. Even though our inner lives might seem intensely private, we’re social creatures, so we’re dreaming in both a personal and social context.

Dreams are notorious for being slippery and hard to hang onto with our waking minds. Sometimes I’ll awaken at 2am from a dream that may seem so clear and compelling that I couldn’t possibly forget it when I awaken in the morning. Come morning, it’s gone. True, taking a more disciplined approach to our dream lives, as outlined above, can definitely help. But still, the reason that is necessary for many of us is that it’s pretty easy to lose connection with a dream in the waking world.

Dreams have their own logic. They follow their own rules.

And perhaps for that very reason, the larger culture most of us inhabit doesn’t encourage much focus on dreaming. This despite the fact that dreaming is universal and the fact that it’s been pretty well demonstrated that dreaming is important for mental and physical health.

I conjecture that in part this is because dreaming is subversive of external authority. Dreams and dreaming can motivate changes in life. Dreaming points beyond. Pick up the Bible or a biography. You’ll find, dreams can matter. History turns on the pivot points of dreams — dreams of all kinds.

So let me try to describe for you a recent experience. This isn’t a dream, exactly, but I think it says something about why dreams are important and how they relate to the rest of life.

A few nights ago as I was falling asleep, the words, “Speaking of Dreams” popped into my mind. I was just getting comfortable, and it would have been really easy to say, “Oh, that’s such a simple phrase. I’m sure I’ll remember it in the morning.”

As a writer, every time I allow such a thought to guide my actions, I end up regretting it. It’s just as easy to lose a significant thought or expression as it is to forget a dream. So I got back out of bed and shuffled to my computer in the next room. I tapped at the keyboard for a few minutes. Aside from the title, the writing was sort of confused, and as I was reading what I’d just written, I thought, “I got out of bed for this? So what?”

Well, sometimes this happens. Sometimes an inspiration just fizzles. Still, I trusted that the thoughts I still felt moving behind the words were pointing in a direction that, if pursued with a little more energy and focus in the morning… well, and here you can read or hear the results.

One point in telling this story is that at least as far as I can see, there doesn’t seem to be as big of a difference between our nighttime dreams and what we think of as our conscious daytime experience as one might suppose. Any writer will tell you that the impulse to wait to write down a thought or idea is risky at best. My theory is that like dreams, the most important thoughts we have, the ones that come to us with compelling power or novel simplicity, tend not to have easy, clear points of connection with thoughts that are ordinary and habitual. Given that there’s often such a thin and friable connection there, it’s easy to lose them. And as writers, when we lose these inner connections, we lose our opportunity for authorship.

Any authoritarian dictator will tell you that permitting people to think their own thoughts and dream their own dreams is dangerous — at least to such dictators and their plans. Again, dreams have their own logic. They follow their own rules. You can see why this would represent a threat to those who want to control everything. This is why there’s a political dimension to us claiming authority over our own thoughts and dreams.

Personally, I claim no authority except a gentle kind of stewardship over my own thoughts and dreams, but making such a claim can matter very much to those who want to claim authority over others. It’s part of why I dedicated this channel to exploring inner worlds, outer worlds and the connections between them.  To me, that’s key to everything. I’m not saying everyone has to be a writer, though there’s definitely a kind of magic in writing and I think many people would benefit from keeping a notebook or journal. That said, whatever form it takes, I do sense pretty strongly that it’s important to claim authorship of our own thoughts and feelings and dreams and our own inner lives in general.

Here we are in an election year in the U.S., and it feels to me like the contest may be much less about what’s happening “out there” than is commonly supposed. Not that things like candidates and polls and speeches and who said what or who supports some policy or other do not matter. I just don’t think they matter as much as is commonly believed. Or maybe all these things just need to be interpreted as one would a dream.

Hmmm….

Because really, so much of this is about what’s going on inside of us. After all, that’s what all the stump speeches, media interviews, advertising dollars and all the expensive polling, news coverage and commentary are doing: trying to get at our insides to gauge, mold and shape what’s going on inside us. Of course, those who would shape us according to their wills no doubt find their job easier when we’re not really even looking at what’s going on inside us, when we abdicate the perennial sovereignty of our inner focus, and when we fail to claim authorship of our own thoughts and dreams and the power that doing so naturally confers to our way of being in the world. Ceding that power leaves a lane open for ambitious local Commissariats of Ideas, those whose mission it is to make sure we are well supplied with official versions of what’s real, no doubt working in close coordination with the Undersecretary of Dream Manufacture in the Ministry of We Know What’s Best For You.

We expose ourselves to risk to the extent that we give over our inner worlds to such external authorities. Sorry if that sounds radical, but I feel I’m on solid ground in saying this. It’s kind of funny to notice that at the same time we’re socialized to believe that what’s going on inside us is worthless and meaningless and empty and that what’s really going to make life better is a candidate, or a product, or a medicine or a lifestyle, I mean, it looks to me like our inner life is the turf that those who want to control us covet most. That’s why so much money is spent and such enormous exertions are undertaken to shape events and social systems and technologies that get at our insides.

I suspect that’s also the deeper reason why the whole of the sacred earth has undergone a strange transformation and become a thing profaned and hollowed out, an article of commerce, a data set, mapped and surveilled, every tree and house, every spoken word, pack of gum purchased, computer click or trip to a friend’s house or park, quantified and tracked and bought and sold. What I’m saying here is, if you’re feeling besieged these days as satellites are hurled into the sky by the score, perhaps that’s because in essence this is what we’re seeing: the besiegement of our inner worlds through the comprehensive and exponential insinuation of power structures into the outer one.

And this, my friends, is why I suggest we focus more on our thoughts and feelings and dreams, taking the time to really pay attention to what’s going on inside of us and to dig deep and discover what it is, whether we are in solitude or with others. That’s the place from which our power grows.

Okay, so…  there you have it. One last question before we go: Was this worth me waking up in the night for?