When we use the verb, “dream”, we might mean someone is thinking about something they want to see happen in the future. We’re dreaming about a possible relationship, perhaps, or a new car, or a new job… “but it’s still a dream.”
Other times, we might mean something just slightly different — an imagined future situation that almost certainly will not occur. World peace, for example. Winning the lottery. Fitting into the clothes we wore 20 years ago. “It’s only a dream.”
In either case, they are situations that exist in our imaginations. This is a fascinating aspect to human consciousness, I think — our ability to imagine future events, either likely or unlikely, and to harbor desires around those future events. Fascinating, but also completely ordinary.
Such ‘dreams’ are typically referred to as ‘daydreams’.
There’s a third, ordinary aspect to human consciousness that we also call, “dreaming” — but it’s a rather different aspect. These are the experiences — often mundane, sometimes vivid, perhaps even frightening — that take place while we are asleep. If you research scientific theories about nocturnal dreams, you find a well-accepted idea about human consciousness — that all of human consciousness, including dreams, results from chemical and electrical activity taking place inside the physical brain. While we are awake, the brain is subject to sensory inputs — sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste, (and perhaps other inputs that are not yet recognized or documented) — and these sensory experiences inform our perception of the universe.
According to this theory.
When we are asleep and dreaming, in the state defined by science as REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, a common modern theory holds that the experiences we’re having exist only in our minds — that these experiences are purely imaginary, and are psychological tools utilized by our subconscious or our unconscious to help us process events that happened during our waking hours… or that we fear might happen in the future, during our waking hours… or that we wish could happen during our waking hours… or perhaps, events that happened in our waking hours about which we feel a sense of failure or shame.
Some scientists connect nocturnal dreaming with the brain’s process of building new synaptic pathways and connections during the relative peacefulness of sleep, while no new sensory inputs are making demands on our consciousness.
If you research nocturnal dreaming on the internet, you will find an overwhelming number of websites that promote this general theory. For example, from a Scientific American article by Ernest Hartmann, from 2006:
…the contemporary theory considers dreaming to be a broad making of connections guided by emotion. But is this simply something that occurs in the brain, or does it have a purpose as well? Function is always very hard to prove, but the contemporary theory suggests a function based on studies of a great many people after traumatic or stressful new events. Someone who has just escaped from a fire may dream about the actual fire a few times, then may dream about being swept away by a tidal wave.
Then over the next weeks the dreams gradually connect the fire and tidal wave image with other traumatic or difficult experiences the person may have had in the past. The dreams then gradually return to their more ordinary state. The dream appears to be somehow “connecting up” or “weaving in” the new material in the mind, which suggests a possible function. In the immediate sense, making these connections and tying things down diminishes the emotional disturbance or arousal…
Ernest Hartman, while writing this article, was working as director of the Sleep Disorders Center at Newton Wellesley Hospital in Boston. In other words, his dream theory was presumably built upon studies of people recovering from trauma. But most of us are not recovering from trauma — last I looked — and yet studies suggest that non-traumatized people average 3-6 dreams each night, even though they may not remember any of them.
One problem I have with the current scientific theories, explaining nocturnal dreams as a process of ‘consolidating events experienced during the day, while sleeping’ is that my dreams (and perhaps your dreams) almost never happen in a physical location that matches, completely, a physical location that exists when I am awake. I often dream of entire communities and landscapes different from any I have ever visited. The people and objects in my dreams are often only vaguely similar to “real” people and “real” objects from my waking life.
My ‘dreamtime’ experiences don’t feel, to me, like I am simply ‘consolidating events experienced while awake’. Dreamtime feels more like a visit to an alternate universe.
The laws of nature, for example, do not always hold in my dreams. People and objects can change shape, for no apparent reason, and can appear and disappear. People sometimes behave as they never would in my ‘waking world’. Sometimes I behave as I never would in my ‘waking world.’ The world of my nocturnal dreams, in other words, unfolds itself in ways significantly different from the world I experience while awake.
Why does nocturnal dreaming unfold in such a different universe from daydreams and ordinary waking experiences?
Modern science is frustrated by this question. Modern science is based upon the idea that “reality” consists of things that can be measured and counted. But dreams, as real as they might seem while we are having them, are immune to being measured or counted. They occur in a space that science cannot access.
Historically, many cultures have held nocturnal dreams in high regard, as a window into the future, perhaps, or as a doorway into the spirit realm. Dreams have also been understood, in other times and places, as communion with a ‘universal consciousness’.
But so far, it would seem, science has been unable to weigh in on these possibilities.
Bill Hudson began sharing his opinions in the Pagosa Daily Post in 2004 and can’t seem to break the habit. He claims that, in Pagosa Springs, opinions are like pickup trucks: everybody has one.