In Dreams

Lately I've been having a lot of dreams. I can tell I've been having them, even though it seems I remember about 10% of them. The details I do remember are so vivid, complex, and horrible that I realize they are only the loose ends of a great tangle of yarn now washed away irrevocably by the tide of consciousness.

There was a town full of strange people, for instance, all of whom had secrets from each other and themselves, and it was hard to keep track of who knew what, because they were all related in complicated ways. One woman, who had fond memories of riding her horse as a child, suddenly remembered that the horse had in fact been killed by her father, and that he had made her tie up its dead body with rope and stuff it into his station wagon so he could drive it to the dump. But it hadn't fit, so she had been forced to break its legs and neck by slamming the car's gate on them repeatedly.

Another night, I started screaming in my sleep until I woke myself up with the noise. Then I continued screaming as loud as I could, not even knowing why anymore. I only stopped when my roommate, Dave, screamed back at me from his own bedroom. In the morning, I couldn't remember anything of the dream that had been making me scream in the first place. I apologized to Dave about the crazy behaviour, and he told me nothing of the sort had happened. I'm still not sure whether the screaming was itself the dream.

I was talking with Amber about dreams and the unconscious yesterday after watching Rosemary's Baby. We were wondering what purpose dreams serve in our lives and going over some of the answers science has hypothesized over the history of psychology: bringing unconscious feelings to light, problem-solving, solidifying neural pathways, sorting memories and emotions for later retrieval, relating the events of our lives to archetypal stories for easier understanding…

Then it occurred to me that the reason no one has ever come up with a solid, satisfying answer is that the question is misguided. Dreams are just our unconscious minds doing what they always do — trying out various story lines that needn't be rational or really have any recognizable cause except that they bubble up from who knows what murky depths. Those stories become hidden when we're awake, because the job of our conscious minds is to order that raw material into a nice sensible plot and cover the alien world of unconscious thought with it.

It's only when the conscious mind is turned off for a rest that we experience the uncensored creativity that has been going on underneath the whole time. Dreams are to consciousness as skeletons to bodies — horrible monsters that we mostly manage to forget are there, underneath everything, moving us around like puppets. To ask their purpose when we sleep is to ask why the stars come out at night.