In my late twenties, when it had come to me that clever is not wise and I was neither, I encountered the Eastern proverb The wise man never dreams and thought, So what’s dreaming? According to my research at the time, it comes from moments in the day when something could have been noticed but wasn’t quite. The wasn’t-quite leaves an emotional trace, which the sleeping brain reviews so as to do better next time. A hawk drops from an empty sky. The squirrel dekes, talons rake its tail, and the hawk is gone. Emotion floods the bodies of both animals. The next time they sleep, their dreams are electrochemical reviews of the reflexes that saved the life of one and were activated as the other missed a kill. The reflexes didn’t quite work, or they worked, but they could work better. A fish, not a big dreamer, will try the same thing somewhere else; a creature that dreams will try something different in the same place.
Human dreaming adds a level. Unless a person lives under constant threat of physical violence, their daily threats and challenges are mainly psychological. As Sigmund Freud said, the ego is above all a body ego. With self-consciousness, our reflexes to defend the body became available to defend the self. Like feathers that evolved for warmth subsequently used for flight, self-consciousness is an exaptation of body consciousness. Moments of challenge to our self-image inadequately registered at the time are due for dream processing. But if a person were paying attention, I reasoned, they could process such incidents in real time, and their dreams would grow quiet or even disappear. This could be wisdom’s back door. I could slip in and mingle with the Illuminati.
To know what to watch for when awake, I tried a biofeedback wristwatch, a thing at the time. When that didn’t work—it wasn’t sensitive enough—I slept with a pad and pencil to record my dreams. Three to five times a night, usually toward the end of a REM phase, I would surface and start writing in reverse order through the dream to as close to its beginning as I could reach before I fell back asleep. After six months, I was getting down approximately four dream sequences a night. I did this for two years.
In the morning, I typed up the dream notes and footnoted them with as many sources in the day as I could identify. By midway through the second year, this was eight or nine out of ten such sources. All were from the previous week, most from the previous forty-eight hours. Anything that originated more than a week earlier had come up again in waking memory within forty-eight hours preceding the dream. I would be an outlier in dream labs, where most studies confirm Freud’s claim that dreams tend to derive from experiences six or seven days earlier. But lab subjects are usually science majors earning extra money, with no incentive to pay attention in the day. Does dream material get backed up? Pay attention, and its origins are more recent.
If I didn’t recognize a dream source while dreaming, which I was starting to do, I remembered it when writing down the dream while still half asleep or the next morning as I typed up my notes or when I footnoted them. Doing this, I learned that the past is alive in memory in a form and with a significance revised by its current context. I also learned the difference between my actual concerns and those in line with my ideas about myself, e.g., I think of myself as good to my friends, but here is nightly evidence of the unwitting power-play disservices I do them. This self ran the show. In this I’m unlike my wife, Rosa, who dreams more like an animal, and I say that with the utmost admiration and respect. Her parents were Holocaust survivors; her dreams concern physical danger to our son, David; to me; or to herself—in that order of frequency. Rosa has the kind of dreams you don’t forget because they wake you with a strangled cry. Other kinds she doesn’t remember because they don’t matter to her. As she says, “They’re only about me,” by which she means her ego. This is why Rosa is a psychologist and I am a writer. My signature dreams are about not being able to make myself understood or people getting me wrong.
We think of dreams as portals to the unconscious, promissory notes for our creative powers, but for most of us, like me, though perhaps without the obsessiveness verging on pathology, dreaming is about the maintenance and defence of the self to optimize our chances of social survival. It’s a mechanism for conformity. Dreamwork also teaches that the significance of a particular dream detail or event can’t be understood without knowing its source in experience and understanding its emotional connection to that source. The dream context tells you the rest. Reliance on somebody else’s interpretation is horoscope stuff.
Freud was not a grifter, but he did rewrite and ignore his clients’ accounts of childhood sexual abuse. After first understanding these accounts of abuse as suppressed memories, he concluded they were fears and fantasies; nothing had actually happened. No serious professional would choose to outrage and demoralize the families of his clients. Freud cast unconscionable information as fantasy or theoretical colour. He also took control of his clients’ dreams. Shrugging into a virtual white coat, he turned their experiences into pathologies. They became patients, sick with fantasy, victims of unconscious forces. Always neurotic and never really happy, they would do as well as could be expected, under the long-term care of a medical professional. For Freud, the unconscious is not simply our perceptions and thoughts at the margins of daily perception; it’s an underworld of repression, a trackless wilderness in need of a professional guide.
After more than fifty years as a psychologist in private practice, Rosa is reluctant to make categorical statements about human beings. What she will say is that people are unpredictable. Two individuals can experience the same thing at the same time, and its effects upon each of them will be completely different. A human being is too complex for casual or theory-driven third-party pronouncements about what is going on for them. The same goes for dreams, not simply because we all experience things differently and do different things with that different experience, but because only the dreamer can be sure what dream elements have come from where. Otherwise, all anybody—even a dreamer who recalls only their dream and not its sources—can do is speculate. Just as unexamined dreams reinforce the self, ideas about dreams without consideration of the specific moments that occasioned them reinforce received ideas about dreams tapping into a mysterious reality the conscious mind can only wonder at or will need a guide to explore. But an injustice is being done to how the dream process works and also to the reality of the person whose dream it was.
From dreamwork I’ve learned that dreams aren’t codes for what we don’t want to know; they’re networks of emotion-tagged detritus from our conditioned waking distraction. The problem with reading dreams for hidden intentions is they have no agent. They’re the brain reviewing missed perceptions and inadequately met challenges to a person’s ideas about who they are . Introducing agency to dreams is like paleolithic humans finding intentions in nature. If it’s not the dreamer exercising agency, it’s someone else laying claim to the power that comes of holding the key to those intentions. Brains simply generate emotional associations. The reason dreams feel like stories is that, as self-conscious beings, we spend our days making narrative sense of our lives. We bring story to bear on everything we do so that what we do and think and what happens to us will make sense, which is to say will feel like ours.
As dreamers, we continue to do the same in the night.
Out of habit, the dreamer approaches dream events as if this were daily life, imposing what narrative she can. Once awake, the memory of the dream—her telling it to herself—will have more coherence than the dream had for the dreamer, who was already imposing a story on it, and when she tells it to someone else, it will have still more coherence. Oscar Wilde is reputed to have declared the eight most dreaded words in the English language are I had a very interesting dream last night. If her spouse puts on an interested face, the dreamer will not want to disappoint that solicitude. And if she recounts it to her analyst, who despite a posture of scientific detachment is on the lookout for coded meanings, a fact of which she is aware, the dream material will be under still greater performative pressure to interest someone who knows nothing of the dream beyond what they’re told. By this time the dream is likely to be a different sort of thing from what came up in her sleeping brain. In the retellings, it will have more narrative shape, the connections among its parts more likely to be understood in storying ways that obscure the actual emotional connections between the sources of those parts that resulted in their appearance together in the dream.
A person who isn’t mentally ill but is only unhappy or neurotic can access the margins to good effect, but that’s not what they’re doing when recounting dreams to an analyst. They need their dreams analyzed the way they need priestly absolution for sinful thoughts. Dreams mostly consist of what was overlooked in the recent past, for all kinds of reasons, one of which may or may not be that they didn’t want to know. The radical subjectivity of the dream state gives the lie to the distorting pressure of analysis.
My dreams didn’t disappear, but they did become slow and quiet, and despite waking up to write them down, I was better rested. We’re told that people prevented from dreaming go mad, and it’s true that distraction in the day makes dreaming necessary. But dreaming is exhausting. When dreaming is not necessary, there’s more energy for paying attention, and the thing about attention in the day is that it carries over into the night, and dreams become lucid in the sense of clearer in origin. The rarity of lucid dreaming is testimony to how inattentive we generally are when awake. But notice in the day what’s coming to mind and from where, and in the night the brain does the same. Instead of the dreamer struggling to make everyday sense of dream elements, they will be aware they are dreaming and will recognize the sources of dream elements while dreaming. Freud knew about lucid dreaming, but he wasn’t interested. A lucid dreamer doesn’t need a doctor to know what their dreams mean. Both popularly and in the scientific literature, lucid dreaming is described in the language of wish fulfillment. Lucid dreamers can levitate and pass through walls. But my experience has been that when lucid dreaming results from awareness in the day, it’s awareness in the night of the sources of a dream as they come up. It’s the creative play of discovery, not enhanced control and imaginary freedom from physical bonds. It’s not Peter Pan’s “And bid your cares goodbye / You can fly!”; it’s Paul Celan’s “There was earth inside them, and / they dug.”
Wisdom? It’s the paying attention.