Dreams

Posted by james on Nov. 20, 2001

I was wondering why we put so much import on dreams. There's this part of me that, no matter how much I can explain the origin of my dreams, I'll always believe inside that somehow they're little windows into things that I normally can't see. Maybe they're windows into my own mind, showing me things that are always just outside my consiousness but still affect me. Or maybe they're some kind of connection to all the ethereal things that escape me in my day to day life. It's probably the mysteriousness of them that makes me believe this.

What makes me want to believe they're something more than the simple activity my brain falls back to when it's resting? Why should it be any more than random images composed from the events and people in my real life, combined and distorted? It's disorienting to wake up from a vivid dream and have to sort between the memories of what happened yesterday and the memories from your dream. No matter how much they've explained away the science of dreaming and what exactly is going on in your head, you still wake up feeling that something unexplicable has happened during the night, and all you're left with are pallid memories of it. It almost seems magical in a way.

And maybe that's needed in this day and age. There are so many things that we know (or think we know), and every day science brings a little more reason into the rumors of our world we hear from our friends. "Did you know that mirages are caused by <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/science/wonderquest/2001-05-30-mirage.htm">heat</a>?" "Did you know that stars twinkle because of <a href="http://www.mira.org/fts0/stars/text/txt001c.htm">air turbulence</a>?" All those things we wonder about are slowly being explained, turning them into more mundane things. Where is the magic? Where are the things that bring us out of our everyday lives and convince us that even though we don't understand, we can believe that there's something more than what we see every day, a connection to things greater than ourselves. Dreams could be that... our minds might be our own during the day, slaves of reason and monotony, but during the night some other unseen and unknown force takes over and shows us things unreachable by ourselves.

Another magic might be love. This sounds corny, and I guess it is. Deep down I believe that romance is a sort of incomprehensible magic that defies my attempts to understand it and also convinces me that there is a world outside of and above myself. The third option might be religion. Religion is a funny sort of magic, because it attempts to explain the unexplicable. But the other part is there; convincing me that there is a world higher than the one I see every day, and that gives me something to believe in. It's funny... none of these man-made categories would exist if we didn't desire it somehow. Humans seem to have a built-in desire for things greater than themselves in order to give them a sense of purpose. We need some kind of magic. Does all that make sense?