What Kinds of Dreams Do You Have?

And what do our dreams tell us about ourselves?

We talk about more than just politics and philosophy here at the Freedom Scale. Today is one of those days.

Today, we talk about dreams.

A quote from Twin Peaks has long stuck with me…

Not the recent ridiculous “Season Three” reboot from a few years ago, which was literally a literal crime against humanity. Literally. No, this quote is from Dale Cooper, from the first season of the groundbreaking Twin Peaks from the early ’90s. Referring to dreams, he said,

Acetylcholine neurons fire high voltage impulses into the forebrain. The impulses become pictures, the pictures become your dream. But no one knows why we choose these particular pictures.

Exactly. Where do dreams come from? From our own subconscious? Why would we choose, even subconsciously, to torture ourselves with terrifying nightmares? 

Places you’ve never seen…people you’ve never met…situations you’ve never been in…but it all feels so real. How did those images get there?

Do you remember your dreams in the morning? Do you like your dreams? Do you try to derive messages or life-lessons from them? Or are they an annoyance you could do without?

Tell me about your dreams. (*Said in a hokey Sigmund Freud accent*)

First, in the spirit of sharing, I will tell you about mine…

I have always had an extremely rich dream life. Deep. Vivid. Complicated.

I still remember dreams from when I was a child, including at least one going back to when I was only three. 

I have long been able to hold on to my dreams as I wake, enabling me to recall and recount them. That ability is fading a bit as I age, but even now, if I work at it, I can carry much of a dream into the waking world.

I woke up this morning trying to enumerate about all the different categories into which my dreams fall, and the relative frequency of each category. So that is where today’s post comes from.

Story dreams

Most of my dreams, good or bad, are plot driven. They aren’t just a series of inscrutable, disjointed images—there is a story playing out. There is a narrative thread, which characters, events, plot points, and objectives.

Often, the storyline is fairly grandiose, with a critical mission or existential threat. (A few nights ago, I had to lead my family down an endless staircase to escape the blast wave from a massive meteor strike.) Occasionally, the mundane creeps in—the objective is figuring out where, in some massive city, I have parked my car. But even then, the city streets are vivid and there are obstacles—criminals I must evade, for example—that stand between me and my goal.

As I have previously written, most of these story dreams are like action movies—scary, but exciting. One variant that keeps cropping up is the zombie dream. The places and people change, but the basic plot points are always the same…

I am in charge of getting a large group of people to safety. I shepherd them across a dangerous wasteland to some safe place—a building, a house, an underground facility, or a shopping mall (thank you, George Romero). I project-manage getting the doors and windows barricaded just in time. Then someone cries out, “My child/baby/spouse/whatever is still hiding back in the house/barn/shed/whatever.” So I have to get all geared up, with shotguns and machetes and bandoliers and the like, to go on a solo mission to rescue whoever it is. I sneak out and embark on this mission, and then wake up just as I am being surrounded…

Eating chocolate after 4 PM significantly increases the chances of having a dream like this. I am not going to complain, though. I have had some stunningly complex and truly fascinating dreams. And they’re not all nightmares. In fact, most of these “movie dreams” aren’t.

Place dreams

There is an obscure, archaic word in English: ubiety. It is, in essence, “whereness”—the quality or state of being in a particular place. I have dreams that are absolutely redolent with ubiety—where it’s not about the what, it’s about the where. I feel the placeness of wherever I am so intently that it takes awhile to recover after I wake.

There are three main types:

Cities

I have specific dream cities to which I return—places that my brain has entirely made up, but that stay the same from dream to dream.

One has a really wide river, with skyscrapers on one bank and industrial buildings on the other. I keep returning to one of the skyscrapers—walking through its dingy, narrow halls, climbing its stairs or riding its rickety elevators on my way to its precarious (but exciting) roof.

Another has long parallel residential streets, and a diagonal promenade cutting through all of them, with shops and restaurants. It too looks the same every time. I see it now, clear as a bell.

A third is so vivid, and the vision so expansive, that I could almost draw a map of it—the big park to one side, the parallel streets of the downtown that surrounds it, and the residential neighborhood downhill, and on a strange angle, from the park.

There are others, too

I also keep going back to “real” places: a version of Missoula, Montana, that looks nothing like the real Missoula, and a version of Moscow, Russia, where the proportions are fantastically huge.

Houses

Here, I will just quote a previous post:

“I have had many dreams in which I am exploring fantastically large houses.

“They aren’t clean, opulent mansions with perfectly manicured rooms. They are usually older, and they are always very unique, with strange spaces not typically found in normal houses: An attached warehouse that goes on for hundreds of feet. A house with multiple kitchens or atypical configurations. A middle floor that can only be reached by going to the top floor and then taking a secret staircase down a flight. Often, the houses need work.

“I am seeing these either as a prospective home-buyer or as a homesteader of an abandoned place. A few times, I have dreamt not about a house at all, but some factory or empty facility that I am going to turn into a home. The rubble on the floor that I am going to have to clean up isn’t off-putting—it’s exciting. Here is a place that I can make my own.

“These dreams make me happy too. I can still see some of these houses in my waking mind, clear as a bell.”

Beautiful rural places

These are far and away the most intense. I am walking in some country setting. A forest, a meadow, a hillside. I am suffused with…what’s that German word? Sehnsucht? A wistful yearning?

I cannot even describe it. It is so powerful, it makes my heart ache. I want the place. I want to be in the place. I am the place. I don’t even know.

It is so intense that I fear I will become lost in the feeling, and so I force myself awake. I also have a variant where I am driving through the mountains, and I am simultaneously so happy and so sad. What does it mean?

Sex and courtship

What does it say about me that I have fairly frequent dreams of love and romance? That I am normal, probably.

The truth is, plenty of these dreams are not particularly pornographic—they’re more like courtship. Anticipation. Wooing. Wanting.

Sometimes I am married and it’s my wife. Sometimes I am single and its an old girlfriend, or a woman that my brain has simply concocted.

Back in my very early 20s, there was one young woman who kept showing up: Short, with short black hair and a roundish face. Shy and taciturn (she never said a word), but weirdly alluring. We never touched, but it always felt inevitable. She appeared so many times that I started to assume I would one day meet and marry this person. (And though I did eventually end up in a short relationship with a woman with short black hair, she was anything but shy and taciturn!)

Nightmares 

How often do people have bad dreams as opposed to good? In literature and film, nightmares seem far more common…

My movie dreams are wonderfully exciting, as are the romantic ones. The place dreams are magical and affecting. And sure, occasionally I will have dream that is just delightful, from which I will wake up laughing. I have even flown a few times, and those are amazing. But there’s also a fair amount of horror in there.

Sometimes, it is actually quite subtle and surreal. Once, while still in high school, I dreamt I was in complete darkness, save for a chiaroscuro light focused on a wheel—a strange fan-blade with many small wooden fins. It was just hovering there, horizontal and on a slight angle, rotating slowly. Why was that absolutely horrifying? I have no idea, but it was.

Sometimes, there is a recurring villain…

My house growing up, and my grandmother’s house, were filled with very strange paintings. One of them, painted by a friend of my grandmother, was this stucco job of a disturbing woman with blueish white skin. That woman, come to life in my dreams, terrorized me in scores of nightmares from age three to age 12 or so, when I had one final dream where I put my fist through the painting.

I am not afraid of spiders, but there were so many black widows where we lived in Van Nuys that, for a time, they became the subject of a category of a nightmare.

My wife and I are almost preternaturally compatible. We rarely even disagree to any significant degree, let alone fight. But I will have nightmares of terrible arguments, from which I wake up feeling sad and alone. Those are perhaps the worst of all.

Here too, sugar or chocolate significantly increase the likelihood of bad dreams.

Less-frequent categories…

Like everyone, I have had those awful, repetitive, inscrutable, pattern-based dreams that you get when you have a fever.

A repetitive activity during the day might also induce weird pattern-based dreams at night. They’re hard to explain, but most people have had them, so I don’t really need to.

I have some dreams that just make no sense at all.

Of course, I had some of the stupid trope dreams when I was younger: in public naked, teeth falling out, etc.

One, which is mercifully less common now…

I have a major role in the school play, but I have not practiced my lines once. But it’s not the day of the play—it’s the day before. So I DO have time to learn the lines, but only if I practice nonstop for 24 hours. Annoying!

I occasionally dream of something completely fantastical—a vision of the future, a glimpse of a strange new technology, or a sudden, shocking awareness of some occult reality. Those dreams are particularly amazing.

I could go on about this subject endlessly. Some of it is starting to slip due to middle-aged brain, but I still remember so much and so many.

But now it’s your turn…