Heroes Not Zombies

Three elements in this photo induce me to think about dreaming – sunset, a plane trail, and the moon (yes, look closely, she is there!)

We associate dreaming with sleep, even if we often wake up, knowing that we have been dreaming but have not a single memory of what it was we were dreaming about. Don’t you think that is strange? That the brain can be so active while we are not awake, creating images and whole stories for us to experience, yet somehow so little of that reaches the level of memory. There’s this annoying phenomenon of the first thought on waking – if your first thought is about the dream you were having, then you have a good chance of remembering at least a part of it. But if you are woken by an alarm, or your radio, or somebody wakes you and says something, then the dream is gone. It’s like you have one shot only to recall what you’ve just been experiencing inside your own mind just minutes ago. Turn your attention outwards, and the opportunity is lost.

We don’t only dream during sleep of course. “Day dreaming” has a bit of a bad press. It’s often condemned as distraction, as not paying attention. Or it’s dismissed as fanciful, not useful, not real. But I’m really not sure that dream processes only occur during sleep. After all they aren’t under our conscious control, are they? (lucid dreaming practices aside) So why should we think they aren’t happening below the level of consciousness all the time? Do we need to be asleep for dreaming to occur? I’m not sure that we do. Let’s imagine for a moment that dreaming goes on all the time. Is that where sudden insights come from? Is that where apparently random thoughts come from? Is that where we find inspiration, find our “muse”, tap into our creativity? I think, perhaps, it is.

Our dreams are sometimes thought of as goals or aspirations. They are focused on the future, and suggest new destinations for us to reach for. I’m not a big fan of goals. I think they’re rather over-done. After all, the future is never predictable in detail so what seems a relevant goal now, can become quite irrelevant by the time we get there. And life flows on a continuum. It isn’t broken into discrete, separated parts. Maybe a goal can be thought of as the end of a chapter in an ongoing story, but there’s a danger that goals are seen as conclusions. I’m sure lots of people like to have goals, and find them very useful. They can certainly give us something to progress towards, something to aim for. And if they do that, then fine. They can be motivating and they can help us to focus. And that’s good too.

So, I’m not against goals. I just don’t think they are ever enough. We need more than goals. We need dreams, we need free-floating thought, and we need to keep our eyes open for the whole picture, for the contexts and consequences of our ideas and aspirations.

I suppose I’m saying we need both – to be focused, and to be free-floating. Strangely, dreams can be both of those things at the same time.