Pinch Me

Jean Lecomte du Nouÿ - A Eunuch's Dream, 1874

I assume I dream.  Virtually everybody does.  But like many, I don't know I dream because I never remember dreams in the morning. The ones I do remember once in a while are for the most part mundane: I make my boss cry at work by asking for a day off; I take my time descending stairs in my home to a party I don't want to attend.  On the more exotic side, I think I've time traveled back to 1962 but I can't confirm it.   I've never (to my waking knowledge) had the classic dream that everyone has of taking a final exam with absolutely no preparation.  I suspect this could be because I have actually lived through that experience several times.  As for lucid dreaming, forget about it.

I remember dreams I had as a child.  Some were epic.  My favorites were always those that involved finding a door in a house that leads to a fully furnished labyrinthine wing that hasn't been entered in years, that's been forgotten about, or just neglected.  Sometimes, it's an ordeal to get from the familiar part of the house to the newly discovered but the effort is rewarded. Things are better in this part of the house-- more beautiful, more drenched in light and hope.  The views out the window are spectacular.  There's a hint that I could choose to stay here and maybe close the door on the part of the house I'd leave behind if I weren't being called back to it.  Happening upon this extra living space that was there all along seems to represent an opportunity for reconciliation with an alternate past, yet while I'm exploring,  I sense a growing anxiety that this could be a dream and if so it could be the very last time I set eyes on this discovery.  As it turns out the anxiety is well-founded.  I think about those dreams for days after I've had them.   While they were common when I was younger, it's been years since I've had one.

There are of course many notions about why we dream.  There's evidence that they have a role to play in the maintenance of memory-- either solidifying those details of the day's experience that we could need later on or sloughing off the dead weight to make room for some more.  Nightmares may be the stuff of anxiety but they might also be rehearsals that prepare you for the ordeals that make you anxious in the first place.  They may provide a nightly exercise in sense-making.  Freud of course thought they were a way for the brain to work through the personal traumas and issues that screw each of us up in our own way. Many a work of art or literature has been inspired by dream-life.  You may not be wrong to interpret them as omens.   But if you don't remember them, what good are they?

We dream during Stage 5 sleep, aka REM or Rapid-Eye-Movement sleep, so called because a person observing the sleeper can see movement of the eyes behind the sealed lids while this deepest phase of the sleep cycle is going on.  We remember dreams because we wake up during REM, while in the middle of dreaming them.  Typically, we have 2 or more cycles of REM a night, in the deepest part of the night and also toward morning, conveniently when we are set to rise. In light of this, I think I could be forgiven for concluding that I rarely wake up in the throes of Stage 5.  

Those who study sleep say that unless the reason for this is poor sleep, there's nothing for me to worry about.  I think I sleep pretty well, but if I have a concern, it's not about health.  It's fear of inadequacy.  Others I know-- my wife, daughter and brother-- have incredible dreams, rich, novelistic, cinematic, deep.  They wake up a little changed each day.  How has sleep become such a desert for me? Did I piss Morpheus off?  Am I so uptight that I can't even dream? 

Still, short of convincing (or paying) someone to watch my eyelids while I sleep each night and give me a poke when they detect movement, I'll have to content myself with day dreams.  And while I might be missing out on the profound and awesome landscape of nocturnal unconsciousness, it's not like I can't appreciate surreality when I come across it every waking day.