Dreams are peculiar things.
It’s obvious that they function as an encoding mechanism, converting the day’s significant events into narratives and objects that are absurd or striking in some way (making them quite literally memorable), and knitting these colourful new threads into the existing fabric of our life story.
Yet there are aspects of dreaming that hint at something far deeper. In my own life, a prime example is my decades-long devotion to flying… learning to fly, perfecting flight and, after many, many years, teaching others how to do it.
Though the idea of human beings flying is absurd outside of the dream world, the methods I used to hone my skills were entirely logical, and my progress from novice to expert was measured and predictable. It was a lot like learning to fly in the waking world, minus the nuts and bolts aircraft.
In the first of these dreams, I started out by running as fast as I could, down the entire length of my grandad’s garden path. He’d been in the RAF during the war and, in the mind of a seven-year old, the ridged, cast-concrete slabs seemed long enough to land a Spitfire. Or, once you were asleep, to launch yourself into the air. It took many months of increasingly vigorous sprinting to make off the ground for more than a split second. To an adult, my achievement would have registered as little more than a half decent long-jump. Yet it started a process that continues to this day, half a century later.
Over the following decades, I climbed higher and higher, and stayed in the air longer and longer, with less and less effort. Eventually, I could lift off and float around without even thinking about it. The first time this happened, I tried to walk towards my front door, after someone rang the bell… but I instantly found myself stuck on the ceiling (upside down), scuttling towards my unknown visitor like an inverted crab.
Of course, I now realise that episodes such as this were probably some form of astral projection, rather than bog-standard dreams. The nature of my ethereal body and floating movements certainly suggests the former, though the absence of lucidity (awareness of my actions within the dream itself) is more typical of the latter.
When I wasn’t floating like a feather, I zoomed around like Superman, often with my arms outstretched and my hair fluttering in the wind. On one of the rare occasions that I did realise my powers within the dreamworld, I chose to fly through the crest of a huge ocean wave, alongside a dolphin. The experience was astonishing and invigorating. It also felt entirely ‘real’. Well, as real as cavorting through waves with Cetacean companions ever can be, I guess.
[Image credit: Pixabay/Kellepics]
Teaching others how to fly started around a decade ago. One person asked me how to do it, and I gave him a short demonstration. Before long, I routinely flew with other people; often the same people. Though I never recognised anyone from waking life, I had the feeling they were all flesh and blood human beings, living somewhere in this world.
These days I rarely take to the air, though I’m not entirely sure why. Perhaps I’ve grasped all there is to learn, and it’s time to move on to something else. That would be a shame. Flying was a frequent and much anticipated aspect of my dreamworld and it took me beyond the mundane jumble of people, places and emotions that routinely course through my grey matter, be it awake, asleep or somewhere in between.
Then again, I seriously doubt that our grey cells have directly responsibility or control over much of what goes on when our conscious minds relinquish the reins.
If you follow the idealist view of reality, our brains act more like filters of conscious experiences, rather than generators. In this model, reality is an infinitely large, infinitely complex soup of endless interactions between conscious agents (me, you, your cat…) and our brains are designed to filter most of this out. Without this filter, we would be overwhelmed by information and find it impossible to function. In short, we have evolved to ignore most of what’s going on, and to focus on the incredibly narrow bandwidth of sensory data that helps us to survive.
Sleep can be seen as the filter losing some of its power, allowing the stranger, more esoteric aspects of wider reality to seep through.
Should that be the case, then dreamed events may have just as much ‘validity’ as those in the waking world. At the very least, they are replete with hints and snippets garnered from universe that lies beyond the confines of conscious awareness; a universe in which individual expectations and aspirations mean almost nothing, and where past, present and future exist simultaneously, obliterating the concept of a linear time and opening the door to episodes of precognition.
By shuffling the pieces that make up our identities and scrambling the stories that our egos use to support our sense of self, dreams inject a healthy degree of chaos and uncertainty into our lives. As the fourth century BCE Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu declared, after a particularly vivid experience: ‘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’.
In some tiny part of the infinitely fractal kaleidoscope of universal consciousness, I am still flying through that wave.
Comments