Interpreting dreams can be a circuitous task. While more and more is known about this strange terrain in which each of us spend our nights, the world of dreams is still largely mysterious to us. It’s believed to play a role in memory consolidation and the processing of events and traumas in our lives, but whether or not each of our individual dreams has meaning is something that’s still widely debated in the scientific community.
While some scientists argue that trying to make sense of many of the specifics of our dreams is largely without value, most still agree that there’s something to be gleaned from the broader themes at play. There are useful interpretations for some of the more common dreams and nightmares that people experience. Being naked in public, losing our teeth, or being overwhelmed with work are dreams that speak to some of our most primal anxieties and most of us experience them at some point or another in our lives.
But what then of all of the specific places that we go and the conversations that we have each night? Can it all be arbitrary? Is most of what takes place in our dreams just the scattered events of our lives congealing themselves into meaningless mosaics? It’s a question to which there are no simple answers and one that remains divisive to this day. Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, two of the great minds in the newfound field of psychology and dream analysis, differed in their beliefs here.
Freud believed that much of our conscious and unconscious thought processes could be traced back to our sexuality and that our dreams were largely simplistic in nature. But Jung felt as though there were deeper explanations for these experiences.
In my personal experience, whether or not there’s a deeper interpretation to these nightly hallucinations is something I’ve gone back and forth on. So often, the places I go and the events that take place each night as I sleep simply appear to have no purpose to me. I don’t usually attempt to apply interpretations to any of the stranger and finer minutia that I encounter. I think that a lot of the time it’s easier to make some sense of these narratives we create when we look at them through a wider lens. There are certainly recurrent themes and motifs in our dreams even if the building blocks are more or less a haphazard jumble of thoughts and impressions.
But in some of the dreams that I’ve had, it’s as clear as clear can be that the components of these environments are no simple accident. Sometimes it feels impossible to escape the value in the specific ways that my mind constructs these strange planes of existence.
In one dream, I got the chance again to speak with a friend of mine who committed suicide seven years ago. There are people who I think that my mind might be able to convincingly replicate, but Jacob isn’t one of them. He was impossibly bright and a little too quick-witted for most of his teachers to even keep up with. The memories I have of him have begun to feel distant. His voice has grown faint.
The second I saw him I knew that I was in a dream. We launched into a conversation so lively that I simply couldn’t deny that it was him I was speaking to. His voice soared with an acute and forgotten timbre. He spoke with stunning depth in a room that was alive in eerie detail. The posters that lined the walls might have lingered somewhere deep in the pits of my subconscious mind. But that voice? That inhuman retention for the bizarre and esoteric? There’s just no way that such a colossal personality could be housed within the walls of my sleeping mind.
The things that he had to say were so wildly dense — so completely himself — that I struggled to even formulate my replies. I stood in that room carefully absorbing his words. But as I began to address with him the way that he died, I watched dire confusion morph into solemn clarity. He aged suddenly and acceptingly into the old man he never lived to be. It was heartbreakingly beautiful to witness.
It was the closest I’ve ever gotten to experiencing closure. And it was an experience that felt grander in its meaning and more refined in its detail than anything I believe I could simply conjure on my own.
I’ve had dreams, too, where I’ve gotten to revisit the dog of my childhood in worlds so teeming with detail that the experiences have felt far more like divine gifts than random consolidations of memory.
I don’t believe that it’s every dream that offers something so profound. Sometimes I think the elephant chasing me through my best friend’s house is just that — a random, jumbled and meaningless combination of the thoughts and images of our lives. It’s comical, though, that it’s dreams like these that sit conveniently alongside the ones that feel nothing short of cosmic.
At worst, I think dreams are playful little creations of the brain — colorful, frenzied fragments of life from a reposed mind titillating itself; they’re curious sculptures we design to process an existence that demands some overarching meaning. At best, I think that dreams offer a glimpse not just into ourselves, but to the deepest and most impenetrable mysteries of the very universe.