I think dream analysis is nonsense. I don’t have the patience to listen to analysis of dreams or, in most cases, dreams themselves. The comfort of objective analysis of bizarre imagery is understandable–one has a dream with unfamiliar elements combined in a strange bouquet of nonsense, and there’s a relatable desire to make sense of it. The explanation is simpler, more boring and less comforting: the human mind is complex, and sleep is a biological process that helps your mind organize memories. The side effect of this process is the perception and recombination of memories as the relationships between those memories are established. That’s an offensively crude explanation, no doubt, but it’s my simple understanding of what goes on when one dreams.
My attitude toward dreaming is doubtlessly informed by my inability to remember dreams. Only once in a while am I able to recall something I dreamed as I wake up. It’s not a matter of losing the memory after waking, it’s a matter of not having that memory while conscious. While that explains my lack of interest in dreaming and dream analysis, my hostility may have something to do with incidents of sleepwalking and night terrors I’ve had.
“Night terror” is a strong word, but from what I’ve read, it describes what’s happened–usually I hallucinate that there’s some sort of creature in the bed or room with me (a bear, insect and snake, in the cases I can remember) and I run out of the room screaming. These are rare, and only happen when I’m under stress or I haven’t had enough sleep. I haven’t sleepwalked in five years, but my parents would always tell me about my wandering around the house the next day. I don’t like not knowing what’s going on and having no control over myself when I’m asleep, and dreams fall into that category.
So I take a rationalist stance toward dreams and dreaming, though sometimes I wish there were an explanation that provided some meaning. It would help make some sense of the dream I had the other night about Judy Garland talking about marriage and revealing a tattoo of the word “almost” written in runes. I’ll take the mystery over the false explanation any day. «»
