Portals of Ivory and Horn

Dogs dream.

We can have no idea what they dream about, but they dream.
Watch them.

The paws move, they make little huffing noises, the tail twitches.
What do they dream of?

Do even our domestic dogs dream back to a collective Jungian unconscious of chasing rabbits in a pre-human Doggie Utopia?

I doubt it.

What are our dreams?
Why DO we dream?

I don't think all our dreams are quite the same. I think maybe our dreams really do tell us a lot about who we are. I think that our dreams ARE us doing something, and we do it for a reason.

We spend a lot of time asleep. Even someone with what is pretty much a sleep disorder, such as myself. A long time, when you think what that means in the wild.
A long time to be prey.

Time in which our physical framework goes into overdrive using up the entirety of its energy in repairing nerve endings, healing wounds, building bones, etc.

The stuff it cannot devote full attention to whilst movement is ongoing.

The bodily equivalent of a factory shutdown.

And the body seems to need at least five hours.

But the mind? What does the mind do?

I don't think the mind ever quite shuts down. I've heard many people say they can't state for sure when they went to sleep. I always know, pretty much. I know, because when I wake up I find that as I adjust my eyes my brain pretty much hands me back the thought processes I was last occupied on. I know the time I dropped off, almost to the minute, because I know exactly how far down the line of a particular speculation I was.

And judging by just how quickly you can lurch out of sleep at the slightest warning, I don't think your senses are ever truly switched off.

Of course, I'm aware this is partly subjective. I think I probably physically wake up and check my surroundings every half hour or so. Gut instinct, learned in a place where you never sleep easy, because you never really trust the person in the bed nearby. One hand is always tensed to deliver that defensive blow to the neck.

I think sleep paralysis says a lot. I've posted on it once before, early in the life of this blog. I've had it, and it's downright scary. In the middle ages it was seen as demons come to get you, now the uneducated blame Aliens. I know who to blame. The computer game Halflife and Amphetamines. Basically, its walking up to a lucid dream in a jolt whilst your body still has all your muscles switched off. Of course it's freaky.
But it also tells us a lot about what dreams are.

I really don't believe anything Freud had to say about dreams. I don't think ties are penises, or going up stairs symbolises sex. My experience is dreaming about having sex, symbolises sex and walking up stairs suggests you're going somewhere.

So I look at my dreams and what I think they mean.

There was a time when I thought that our dreams might be us entering the lives of parallel versions of ourselves living in parallel universes. That somewhere in another dimension, lived another me- or multiple other versions of me, and that in our dreams we got to see those other days that the our other selves had.

The reasons I thought this were sound. I had- still have- many dreams where the dream has a self contained life- and more importantly, self contained memories, self contained awareness.

As in people appear who you do not know in real life. And you wake up not knowing who they are. Nor can you remember the name they had in your dream.

But in the dream they had a name. And a past. A past they shared with you. The dream you has a whole shadow past, which the dream you remembers.



There is a frequently occurring dream me. A dream me of a certain type which long made me believe it really was a parallel life I was looking into.

It was/is our world, but it was/is not. And that me is not me, not me as I am. And the divergence has grown wider over the years. But is he me as I might have been? Yes.

The world he lives in is ours, but it's not. It's a more openly corrupt world and the type of me who exists in these dreams is the me that I guess would exist in such a world, if he existed in such a world. I often don't like that me. For one thing, he always carries a gun. And he's used it. And when he does, he doesn't fire once. Three shots in succession, always.
He's a me as I might have become had I been subject to a mafia state and had power within such a society.
That dream me doesn't even like himself. He seems to live in perpetual fear.

These dreams don't show up often. But when they do, they're always vivid. With a clear plotline.

Other dreams I realise are based on hopes and fears. The dreams where you try to run, but can't move.
And haven't we all had the dream where we think we've woken, but are actually still dreaming? And aren't those always when deep down, you know it's time to get up, but you're bloody tired?

And school. How often do we dream about being back at school? Why?

I guess it's something we all look back on. Adolescence is a burden enough as it is, learning how to deal with discovering that in spite of the 'yuk' we felt about mating with the opposite sex a few years prior, actually we want to do it- oh- so- very- much. And pubs. And the rest of it.
And have to earn alphabetically graded bits of paper that would brand us with the mark of Cain for life. Adolescence as human society creates it today, is an ordeal we never forget. And it haunts our dreams for life. Or it does mine, anyway.

Some of the things I've done in dreams have really made me think when I've woken. I've never had a gun pulled on me in real life, but I know how I would react, simply from how it happened in my dreams.

Do we ever have happy dreams? I don't know. I think most people would say most dreams have a dark edge to them. For one thing, and I've asked this of many people- is it just co-incidence that in your dreams, its more often night time than day time?

Symbolism in dreams? No, I don't think there is. Not universal symbolism anyway.

I think its pretty much the same as a flight simulation. I think its brain maintenance.
I think your brain just does a systematic overhaul in the time that elapses between the time the brain says its physical processes are prepared to the time the rest of the body says its ready to switch on again.

I think it uses simulations, fantasy existences and the like to mentally test hypothetical situations, deal with underlying hang ups, work through problems- though not always in the way you'd notice, because it takes the shortcut of going right back to tweak the very roots of your thought processes.



And to do that it sometimes has to return to how you set those thought processes up in the very first place.

Those disturbing childhood memories you seek to suppress.

Your brain psycho-analyses you in ways a psycho-therapist never could.

I think dreams are good things. I look at my dreams, and yes, they often disturb me. But I actually do think that often, they are me coming to terms with me. That parallel me I described above, that's my own mind creating the worst possible me that could exist and exploring just what it is I really am, worst case scenario. I guess I know from my dreams exactly what I'd do in the worst situations my mind can conceive of. I know my mind is fully cognisant of its own systems- I know I COULD conceivably kill, but could NEVER conceivably rape. And that's reasonably comforting to know.

Your dreams really are your mind pushing the boundaries of who you are, dealing with every possible extremity that might come your way.

Of course your dreams are weird. It's like having a probe run through every image subconsciously sitting in your mind and rearranging them, so that when you wake up you're mind is fighting fit again.

You know when they say 'Sleep on it'?

They're right.