I Have a Dream...

Martin Luther King and ABBA both agreed on this point – I have a dream. It’s a recurring dream and one which I am more than happy to analyse. It has its variations from night to night but its themes and principles remain the same. Let met take you through some of the versions.

I’m back at school. I don’t mean back in time, I mean I have returned to school as a twenty (cough) year old. Naturally, dreams being dreams, nothing goes according to plan. There is the one where my tie is too tight. No matter how much I loosen it I can’t breathe. Even when I get the tie off, my collar is still too tight. I’m not chocking as such – just very uncomfortable. On the face of it the analysis is that I don’t like uniforms. That conformity isn’t something I relish.

The more common scenario is that I’m nearing the end of the course and I haven’t been to any lessons. This is true whether it be school or university but it’s usually school. The only time it has been identified as a specific subject it was chemistry. I don’t think that is significant. It is important that I haven’t chosen not to go to the lessons. I haven’t been skiving off somewhere. I’ve not been behind the bike sheds smoking cigarettes or down the arcade playing fruit machines (children may have moved on from my 80s Grange Hill ideas of truancy) – I have lost my timetable / never had a timetable and didn’t get round to sorting it out. We are now approaching the end of the year (not actually at the end) and I’m getting worried.

I think the meaning is clear. The going back to school / university is a definite indication that I want to retreat into the past rather than go on into the future. To return to somewhere that I wasn’t actually happy but it is familiar. Somewhere in my subconscious I believe that hiding in an unhappy past is better than risking an unhappy future. That the certainty of a mild unhappiness is enough to offset the insecurity of a future which could go either way. The missing timetable is something (likely everything) that I’ve not done. I’ve missed out on a lot and it bothers some part of me. Perhaps the fact that I’m not sat in an exam room and facing a paper on the subject that I’ve not studied is an indication that it isn’t too late to do something about it. I’m not at the end, facing the consequences of my inaction, I’m at a crossroads where I could make up for it or I could just worry about it until it becomes too late.

You see, here’s the thing – I disagree with the myriad of complicated dream theories. I believe that dreams are more straightforward than people think. Or rather people don’t think. Most dreams are lost when we wake up but those that remained could be analysed. I believe (and it’s only a belief) that dreams are simply our free minds communicating. We communicate during consciousness using words. Words which usually can’t describe what we feel. Language is as much a barrier to communication as it is a facilitator. This is what art is for in the conscious world. Art is a way of communicating which doesn’t rely on language. A painting is more than just a picture because it is imbued with emotion. Without that emotion it is just a painted photograph. When we sleep our subconscious mind (which is just our brain freed from the constraints of consciousness) communicates with us in a totally different way. It presents us with familiar people, places and events but uses them to tell a story or generate an emotion. Just as a pianist takes ordinary notes and makes a tune, so the mind uses ordinary images to make a dream.

There are books about dream analysis and I would sooner eat my own tongue than read one. They say things like “dreams mean the opposite of what they appear to mean” and I don’t hold with such claptrap. Books like this stop people from thinking about their own dreams. They try to pigeonhole their mind’s output into categories thought up by someone with a publishing deadline to meet.

Last night I had another variation on the school dream. It was the end of term and I had emptied my various desks and lockers into four large bags and was lugging them around the school. It was a tough job as you can imagine and I kept losing things and lagging behind everyone else. I don’t remember (or never knew) why we were going all over the school. All I could concentrate on were these bags of old stuff. The meaning seems fairly clear – so preoccupied was I with the baggage of the past that I was missing out on the present.

Can all dreams be analysed? Should all dreams be analysed? I would say no – not analysed but thought about. There are always lulls in the day where a few minutes to think about something arises. The trick, I believe (there’s that word again – important to keep using it since it is only a belief and by no means would I present it as definitive for that would make me no better than those peddling their theories for £5.99 a time in WHSmith) is not to dwell on the actual details and try to see them as metaphors for something else. School may not be school – it may just be the past. Alicia Silverstone may not represent Alicia Silverstone but just an unrealised ambition or craving. Running over a Cyberman in a Metro doesn’t necessarily mean you want to drive a sensible small car. It might be something much more mundane like a desire to save the world.

So don’t let someone else tell you what your dreams mean – think about them for yourselves and you might learn something about your mind and what concerns it.

06th January 2004