I watched a picture in my head today. As I lay in bed, with my eyes closed, right after I woke up. It was a very nice fall picture. What I saw looked a lot like my backyard, with a row of trees against the back fence. But the trees were were not my trees, close, but not the same. Most of the leaves had fallen, and the ones that remained were brilliant, fiery orange, bright against the morning fog. As I laid there, marveling at this wonderfully clear picture, I was also noticing that I was awake, and could hear the sounds of the neighborhood and feel the cool air coming in the open window. Shortly thereafter, the image faded.
So I got to wondering, where do these images come from, and why do I see them? I have talked about them before. They are generally mundane images or short movies, without any discernible plot, or any point at all, as far as I can tell. Occasionally they can be a bit wild, like a surreal panorama of San Francisco, but mostly not. Sometimes they have contained writing, a book, papers or posters that I try hard to read and remember, but to no avail. I have done this enough that I have developed a trick to tell if I'm in a dream or not: If I can read the text more than once and it doesn't change, then it's not a dream. It's a rather fascinating thing, when I find myself struggling to read the same page, over and over again, trying to understand and solidify the meaning in my head so I'll remember it when fully awake.
Sure, call them dreams. Dreams that cross over. A strange sort of dream that doesn't know it's boundaries, bleeding over into wakefulness like wet ink on a stack of paper, soaking into adjacent pages. Creating images where they don't belong. Famous creative people throughout history have found inspiration and ideas in dreams, are they a window into something greater?
Many will dismiss dreams simply because they are dreams, and a dream is, by definition, something ephemeral, something pie-in-the-sky, something of no substance which disappears in the light of day. But are they, and do they? I submit that dreams are the only thing that makes life worth living. Dreams give us something to strive for, to hope for. Something to get up in the morning and endure our daily insults for. Pains are less, disappointments lighter, and wounds easier to forgive, when there is the hope that springs from, and is sustained by, a dearly held dream. Whose to say dreams aren't real? Faith alone can move mountains, they say, but faith in a dream, that has changed the world.
I insist that dreams are a window into another existence or existences. Places where the rules we live by only apply occasionally, or not at all. Perhaps we are the dream, our rigid, limited, world is the silly fantasy of an unimaginative child who, having no concept of the breadth and shear mind-boggling immensity of the real universe, creates a bunch of simple laws and relations and then sits back and pretends there is nothing else. Are we those children, sitting, firmly planted, on the playroom floor, stubbornly refusing to acknowledge that anything exists except the toys in front of him and the rules he's created for them? Like the seers of old and the shaman of today, I believe that there's wisdom in dreams, wisdom that we should cultivate rather than ignore. Dreamful sleep should be honored as something as essential to productivity and creativity as brainstorming sessions and 80-hour weeks in front of a keyboard. Is the world around us in such good shape with such bright prospects for the future that we can afford to ignore any fresh viewpoint?
They say that when you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. We have been using the same tools for millennia, pounding on the same problems, what has changed? Are there still wars? Do people fight over the stupidest things? Do people still lie and cheat and steal, on a grand scale? Do people still denigrate anyone they disagree with? Do people still abuse, mistreat and mistrust one another? Is fear still the currency of the world, fear of what might happen and what might not? Fear of what you might get, and fear of what you might lose?
Quite frankly, it's more than time for a new set of tools. The old philosophies, and especially the religions, have done nothing to improve the situation, just creating more wedges to drive us apart. We need to spend more time in dreams, looking for alternative viewpoints, new ways to see the world's "insolvable" problems. For truly, what have we got to lose?
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