Thanksgiving morning, 2020.
A global health crisis has been unfolding for the past eight months, accompanied by a global economic crisis. Unemployment is high, but people working in essential jobs are exhausted. Countries around the world are seeing sometimes-violent protest marches challenging institutional racism. In many places, democratic institutions are under siege. The climate appears to be warming steadily, with no deliverance in sight…
A rational person might expect to wake up, on such a morning, from a nightmare. But my dream on Thanksgiving morning was not a nightmare at all.
I walk into the warehouse I am renting with my two business partners, and find a large square box — probably 4 feet square — covered in some kind of white foam wrapping.
(In my waking life, I am not renting a warehouse, and I do not have any business partners. This was just a dream.)
Then I notice that my partners are assembling some kind of machine, which presumably came from the box. It first, the machine appears to be a big vacuum cleaner, but as my partners assemble it, it begins to look more like an enormous riding lawnmower.
As the dream progresses, however, the machine grows to almost fill the warehouse, and assumes the appearance of a monstrous combine harvester. I have climbed atop the machine to make sure the nuts and bolts are securely tightened.
Then I notice that three elderly people, whom I don’t recognize, are also seated atop the machine. They begin singing a very complex and unfamiliar song in three part harmony. A song with religious overtones.
I wake up, and it’s Thanksgiving morning.
I’m assuming, based on my 68 years of observing and interacting with other people, that we each have a slightly different perspective of the world, and slightly different ways of relating to the past and the future. But in large part, we experience the world in a very similar manner. Or so I assume.
Right now, for example, we are all wondering what the hell happened to 2020, and what lies in store for 2021.
Perhaps we’re even have similar dreams? Nocturnal dreams, I mean.
As far as I can tell, science has never been able to confidently explain nocturnal dreams. I mentioned in Part One that our dog, Frida, occasionally exhibits the physical indications of someone ‘dreaming’ when she is asleep — growling and twitching motions of her face and legs. From TheScienceExplorer.com:
How can you tell if an animal is dreaming? Pet owners routinely assert that cats and dogs dream all the time, citing the way their fuzzy friends paw at the air and meow or bark while sleeping.
A more scientific marker of dreaming is rapid-eye-movement, or REM sleep, when the eyelids twitch as the eyes beneath flicker and move as if watching a tennis ball game. During this stage of sleep, the brain behaves almost the same as it does when it’s awake, and that’s when most people report having particularly vivid dreams that they can remember once they wake up.
REM sleep has been observed in all mammals, although in varying amounts. Surprisingly, many animals get even more REM sleep than humans, and platypuses top the list. In fact, they get more REM sleep than any other animal, spending up to 8 hours a day in REM phase. This makes the strange duck-billed mammals the most prolific dreamers in the animal world. On the other side of the spectrum, dolphins get the least REM sleep, if any…
Scientists have also tracked REM sleep in certain birds, but thus far, it would appear, they haven’t studied reptiles thoroughly enough to draw conclusions about dreaming lizards and snakes. Nor have I found any research into the dreams of insects. (If I were funding scientific research, I would support cockroach studies. They just seem like the kind of insect that would have dreams.)
I mentioned, in Part One, that when I was married, I experienced several instances where my wife Clarissa reported dreams that seemed to be prescient — prophetic of events that occurred later on.
(Speaking for myself, I can report only one slightly prescient dream, back in the mid-1970s — when one of my male friends showed up in my dream with his hair in curlers. A couple of years later, it suddenly became popular for men to get their hair ‘permed’.)
From the meager research I’ve done on this topic, it would seems that scientists, nowadays, date the appearance of Homo sapiens at around 500,000 years ago. We might assume that people have been dreaming dreams during that entire time. But it’s been only during the most recent 200 years or so that modern science has been attempting to explain dreams based on ‘scientific materialism’ — that dreams are related to physiological processes in the brain.
But many earlier cultures from various places around the world have assigned spiritual importance to dreams — that dreams provide access to a spiritual realm, in terms of messages sent from that realm, or in terms of actual visits to that realm.
According to Wikipedia, most people in the US continue to believe that dreams can provide access to information — warnings, for example — that are not available to them when they are awake. From the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association, from an article titled, ‘When dreaming is believing: The (motivated) interpretation of dreams’ (2009):
Participants from both Eastern and Western cultures believed that dreams contain hidden truths (Study 1) and considered dreams to provide more meaningful information about the world than similar waking thoughts (Studies 2 and 3). The meaningfulness attributed to specific dreams, however, was moderated by the extent to which the content of those dreams accorded with participants’ preexisting beliefs — from the theories they endorsed to attitudes toward acquaintances, relationships with friends, and faith in God (Studies 3-6)…
Together, these results suggest that people engage in motivated interpretation of their dreams and that these interpretations impact their everyday lives…
The problem of ‘confirmation bias’ is well documented. Is it a problem, when we are trying to understand the meaning of dreams?