The many dreams again! For those who don’t experience this, those who rarely if ever recall their dreams and are not therefore aware of dreaming throughout the night, how could I explain what it’s like? I am usually tired by the time I finish each day, and that finish is usually preceded by reading which, like dreaming, involves creative participation in order to make alive the products of imagination that derive from sources other than my own mind. Reading is a collaborative act, and by no means passive. Ask anyone who didn’t learn, as most of us do now, to read as a child and they will tell you how demanding reading is. And I feel that in many ways my dreaming is also a collaborative act, fueled not only by my reading—and all the other activities in a day, all the other thinking and reflecting and remembering and worrying and pondering and speculating and trying to figure things out in order to understand and proceed—but by everything that happens to me, around me, and not only inside of me. My dreams are private and intimate, even though they are composed of elements that are universally available to all of us. But what makes my nights special is not so much the nature of my dreams, since I don’t believe they necessarily vary much—in their character or even their components—from those of other dreamers, but the fact that I wake up so often and interrupt these dreams and fall asleep again pulling on the tenuous yet mysteriously charged thread of the last dream or dreams as I slip across the border into sleep with that thread dissolving in my hands. This thread unites a night’s worth of dreaming and sometimes I can pull on it the next morning, after I have emerged from the fog and the bog of sleep and dreaming and have allowed the reality of day and light and consciousness to supplant the no less real and always entertaining and intriguing world of shadowy unconscious associations that usually leave me reenergized, satisfied or perplexed, and deeply curious about what happened in any particular dream both before and after I interrupted it; since there is only so very little of the immensity that there was in any dream that I can retrieve from that preserving bog of the subconscious and carry with me like any other archaeological artifact capable of suggesting and representing in a very small sample an entire culture and history, in this case, that of an individual, me. But at least I have that, every night and every day, and I can’t imagine living without it because to no longer dream and dream and dream would be to be, in effect, already dead.
What’s the point?
