What Dreams Are Made Of

[dragon wench]

I know we have two threads here on dreams/nightmares, but since I'm going off on my own tangent I don't want to hijack either. SYM mods, if you feel it more appropriate, please do merge my thread.

As I read the through the posts on nightmares I was reminded of a question I have often posed, Namely, just where do dreams come from? There are many theories, I'm not sure if any recent research has been done though, perhaps CE will be able to shed some light if/when she sees this thread.

I have done plenty of my own speculating however, because I have some profoundly visceral dreams... so vivid that sometimes I seem to bear their physical markings.
Naturally this has led me to plenty of reflection..
I guess personally I support the notion that dreams are manifestations of the deeply buried subconscious. They can be our internal demons acting out... which seems to give shape to nightmares... Or, on other occasions they become a venue.. an expression of thoughts and desires that cannot be allowed the light of day..

Of course, they are not always literal, in fact they rarely are. Rather, dreams/nightmares are replete with symbolism, hence the need for interpretation. Though, as I think we know, there is a danger here, since interpretation is always going to be deeply personal and subjective.

Anyway, thoughts? theories?

[Claudius]

From the Buddhist perspective

........we do not live in a time space continuum we live in an awareness continuum. So dream is just the activity of the mind, but generally we believe in the worlds of our dream and do not realize that it is just mental activity. Just as we are awake we believe we are seeing a solid world rather than the sensitivity of our own minds. It is my impression that the content of thought is impermanent, ungraspable, and unreal but that the sensitivity, vividness-clarity, and openness which is real. During waking life as well as during dreams.

But to specificly answer your question (from a buddhist perspective) which was where dreams come from the answer would have to be the same answer to: where does the mind come from? I think that the mind is believed to be without beginning, without middle, and without end. Seriously! It might seem like I am being cheeky but there is actually some point to asserting that as it removes the assumption of the mind being set in time. And this is believed to be something that you can notice rather than blindly believe.

Also to integrate that information the point should be made that Buddhism often asserts that mind and body are not two. Rather they interpenetrate. And it is believed that believing that they are two leads to suffering...

[Chanak]

I agree with you that dreams originate in the subconscious mind. The bizzare...the nonsensical...the out of place and the illogical...those, to me, are earmarks of the language the subconscious uses. Sleep is regenerative to the body...so perhaps dreaming is regenerative to the psyche?

My own dreams are a mixed lot. Sometimes they are so vivid and appear to make so much sense, I awaken from them emotionally affected for hours afterward. Others I can barely recall...a jumbled mixture of confusing imagery and concepts. For example, I dozed off one lazy afternoon, and had a dream. It was actually quite involved and complex, but it was the sort of dream that faded rapidly from my conscious after I woke up. The only concrete thing I recall from that dream is listening in on a conversation between two people on a commuter train...they were discussing details on how to destroy the sun.

That one made little to no sense at all. Sometimes, I could write mini-novels from some of my dreams. Others, I'd just as soon forget.

[Tricky]

Double post, sorry.

[Tricky]

It does make it sound like the subconscious mind has much more unfathomable depths than the present mind.

I've been watching this nicely drawn 'seinen' (adult subject matter, though not in the sexual/violent sense) anime called Real Drive (Sennou Chosa****su) for a while. It describes a future society that knows a measure of cyberization, not unlike the society found in the Ghost in the Shell films and tv series. Unlike Ghost in the Shell however its emphasis lies on the mind rather than the surrounding architecture. Episodes are based on exploring facets of the spectrum of human emotions. What I find most appealing about the anime is how the mind is portrayed as a vast ocean. They poetically use a cybernetic interfacing technology with the mind based on a form of advanced oceanic tomography, the brain being a watery sponge itself. The real ocean in turn seems to have sentient properties as well (the series hasn't ended, so the final word on that isn't out yet), and a group of scientists try to make contact with it through their work on the interfacing technology.

That reminded me of something Eckhart Tolle's wrote about consciousness, it being a surface thing like a landscape. That is, what we see, not the forces below and above the earth shaping it. And this other guy, whatshisname. There was a BBC documentary about him a few years ago. A British twenty-something, visually sees the solutions of equations without actively thinking them into existence and can learn any language in like a week. He has some autism spectrum disorder that allows him to do stuff like memorize thousands of Pi digits. Anyway, he describes at length how he visually sees sequences of numbers like pi as a landscape. I'm wondering if that's because he's both literally conscious of numbers and can 'see' his own surface take shape before his eyes.

But I'm drifting a little off subject here. I think the mind is vast enough to be an ocean that can give rise to currents on its own accord, advanced emergent properties like dreams (with perhaps the predominant dream being our own consciousness). I've seen really basic life simulation software work on pre-pentium era computers and the mind already is a giant parallel processing quantum computer. But that's too much to think about. I like the simple idea of closing your eyes, sinking deep into the depths of the ocean that shapes the ripples on the surface. And emerging from it eight hours later without coming up for a breath.