Maybe the only point
of being awake is to sleep.
— Ann Germain, Professor of Psychiatry, University of
Pittsburgh, School of Medicine
Maybe we’ve had this wrong all these years. We sleep because our body demands it. The body requires we sleep in order to heal
physically, and there is a school of thought that our dreams help us file all
the stuff that consciously or unconsciously invades our senses while we’re
conscious. Without dreams we would go insane and perhaps die.
But what if it were the other way around? We are awake to take in physical nourishment
and to reproduce our kind in order for us to engage in our primary activity —
to sleep and to dream? Maybe souls, our
essences, our true selves, are found in the dream state. Isn’t it there that we might dip into the
collective unconscious? Maybe it is only
during what we call dreaming that we are connected to the universe.
Maybe this adds a little body to Chuang Chou’s familiar
poetic, and gossamer, philosophic words:
Now I do not
know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a
butterfly, dreaming I am a man.
Let me tell you a story.
It might be true. Sometime in the
early hours of one Sunday morning, I met a man. We were leaving a party and we
were walking outside on a balmy night, a night that was nearing morning. We talked easily, comfortably — as if we’d
known and trusted each other for years.
We talked about cancer and friendship as well as disappointment and
hope.
The thing is we had just met. I cannot tell you where we were or who he was.
We had no history. Further, the whole thing happened in a dream.
As far as I know, this kind fellow, whose name I didn’t get or don’t remember,
doesn’t exist in the real world or at least in the world I appear to be
occupying at the moment. Yet, he was
real. He had a distinctive face, a
particular voice. I spoke. He spoke. For at least those flickering moments, he was
a being. This isn’t an unusual
experience. I’m not sure I’ve met anyone who didn’t dream.
In our dreams, we create people and places and often a set
of circumstances, sometimes wonderfully pleasant, sometimes horribly
frightening. Sometimes the story in our dreams unfolds surreally, impossibly —
at least as we think of these things this way in our so-called conscious
moments. Sometimes though, they are cut
from the same, ordinary, three-dimensional fabric as our everyday lives. Yet —
please excuse the redundancy — in many cases, these places and people, however
real they appear to be, do not exist.
The question is this: Everyone has this reservoir of fiction
that manifests itself during dream sleep.
Is the writer — and let me broaden that to artist — simply given the ability
to pull from the reservoir in the unconscious what he or she wants and bring it
to the surface or is it something else altogether?
Then again, we have this question: Which is the awakened
state? Or are these states equal in some
fashion?
Could I pose the question that writing fiction is organized
dreaming? Controlled dreaming?
2 comments:
What a fascinating commentary! Thanks for sharing this bit of your reasoning. One more reason why I miss you so much.
What we need is a midnight horseback ride out in wild, wild west.
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