“We are such stuff as dreams are made on”
William Shakespeare
I have always dreamed vividly!
Such is – I would hazard – true of many people. Indeed, it is likely that the only real variation is in the intensity of the dreams themselves and in how much of them we can remember upon awakening.
Now, I don’t have much truck with the analysis of the meaning of dreams – certainly not in the ‘if you dream of falling/flying/marrying your mother etc that means xxxx‘ or like manner – though I do have a certain amount of time for Jung’s thinking on archetypal symbols. The business of dreaming itself is of considerable interest, however. I am fascinated by the repetition within dreams of images and memes that date back many decades. Why should those particular notions seem so constant when many other similar ones have faded?
I am also curious about the structure of dreams; of the way in which disparate elements conflate and apparently incongruous situations merge into one another. I find myself wondering (as have many others, of course) what mechanism could possibly be responsible for such apparently ‘real’ sequences and as to what purpose they truly serve.
The other night I dreamt that The Girl and I were in Edinburgh at festival time. We have both separately visited Edinburgh (many times in my case) but I have not attended the festival since the mid 90s. In the dream we had entered an old church which was clearly in use as some sort of venue – a common enough experience during festival time – and I was aware that we were on our way to meet other people. Down at the front of the space there was a group of young people and it was clearly they with whom we were to convene.
It rapidly became apparent that they were all once members of the youth theatre that I helped facilitate back in the 70s and 80s in the UK and I realised (as one mysteriously does in dreams) that they now held regular reunions in Edinburgh during festival time. It was good to meet again people that I had not seen for decades and the occasion was a joyous one. What was odd about the encounter (though not so strange in dream terms) was that these young people were all exactly as I remember them… they had not aged at all!
The Girl and I – on the other hand – had certainly done so!
Now that’s somewhat spooky!
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