Marco's Dreaming FAQ, ver. 3
Marco McClean
first version in alt.dreams, dated 2001-07-12.)
1. Question: Can you recommend a good dream book or web page
where I can look up what my dream means?
Answer: No. The people who write those books and pages
don't know what your dream means or what /anyone's/ dream
means. You might as well close your eyes and point at a random
spot on a random page in a phone book or the King James Bible
or a Jack Chick pamphlet and expect useful results. You might
as well consult the I-Ching or toss goat entrails or throw
darts at a Hieronymus Bosch print or a map of Paraguay, which
like Italy is shaped like a boot, and where, I'm informed by
the CIA factbook on the web, "The disastrous War of the Triple
Alliance (1865-70) cost two-thirds of all adult males and much
territory. Paraguay stagnated economically for the next half
century. In the Chaco War of 1932-35, large, economically
important areas were won from Bolivia. The 35-year military
dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner was overthrown in 1989,
and, despite a marked increase in political infighting in
recent years, relatively free and regular presidential
elections have been held since then."
2. Q: Uh, okay. I dreamed about [fill in blank]. What does my
dream mean?
A: Probably nothing. Certainly nothing anyone can tell
you, if you can't make up what it means for yourself.
3. Q: But it felt so [important; scary; meaningful; weird] and
I woke up [crying; laughing; puzzled; satisfied]. How could
something feel so [important; scary; meaningful; weird; sad;
funny; puzzling; satisfying] and mean nothing?
A: Easily. Most things and events in the real universe
mean nothing. In fact, most of the universe /is/ nothing.
People have access to only an infinitesimal speck of the
universe, yet each person cares deeply about many aspects of
that speck while awake. Feelings appear in dreams too.
Objective researchers who catalog and tabulate the dreams
of thousands of people find that each person feels in dreams,
over the course of years, approximately the same general
emotional tone and level of well-being as he does in his
waking experience, with about the same incidence of strong
feelings as in waking life mixed in. Every once in awhile in
real life you have strong feelings, sometimes several times in
the same hour, sometimes not for days or weeks; and every once
in awhile your dreams include strong feelings.
Pick a film or music or book genre. Say, the romance
novel. Even people who love romance novels admit the stories
are silly and unrealistic, yet they laugh and cry while
reading, and the books satisfy them. When they put the book
down and go about their real life they don't think of the
story they just read as a guide for living or as having deep
significance that must be ferreted out and unriddled and
applied to life. Unless they're crazy.
Or soap operas or science-fiction or horror thrillers or
bubble-gum rock-and-roll or big-band swing or grand opera. Or
dreams. Same thing.
4. Q: Why do we dream?
A: Tens and hundreds of thousands of years ago and more,
dreaming might have been a survival advantage to be ready to
meet novel danger or grasp opportunity. A protohuman dreaming
in his off-survival-duty break-time, asleep or awake, randomly
juggled bits of memories, sensations and feelings to produce a
slightly higher general level of readiness for the unexpected.
Uncontrollable daydreaming (schizophrenia) lowered safety both
for the individual and for the group, so that was well
selected against. There was no danger in uncontrolled dreaming
while asleep, so that /wasn't/ selected against.
It is death for the brains of higher creatures to shut off
entirely. The brain idles when you're asleep, just like the
engine of a big truck parked at a truck stop. It takes little
more energy for the brain to dream than to merely stay warm
and regulate body functions, and there you have it.
5. Q: My [mother, friend, counselor, guru, favorite teevee
performer] says dreams are attempts by [the dead; space
aliens; interdimensional creatures; God; my higher or inner
self; my guardian angel] to communicate with me. Why does
he/she say that?
A: It has to do with salesmanship, storytelling,
self-promotion and camaraderie. We respect people with useful
information, and people like to be respected more than they
care to check the objective validity of what they know; if it
works on the crowd, that's enough for them.
In the prehistoric wild, respecting authority conferred a
survival advantage; people willing to learn from someone who'd
managed to stay alive a long time were more likely to stay
alive long enough to make babies of their own. The elderly
--the twenty-somethings-- knew what plants or animals not to
mess with, where to look for food or catch an animal to eat,
what color water to avoid drinking, what to do in winter, and
how to avoid nature's traps.
In the modern world many personal dangers have been
removed, so our life expectancy is many times what it was in
the wild. (Probably no-one in your family or circle of friends
will starve or freeze to death or be killed by wild animals,
and certainly not if you're reading this on a computer
screen.) What a person believes --as long as it doesn't lead
him to self-destructive physical acts-- probably won't kill
him. So beliefs proliferate with no check. There's no
individual penalty for believing nonsense. An office worker,
truck driver, farmer, waiter, clerk, CEO, hairdresser, English
teacher, etc., can get along fine even while sincerely waiting
and hoping for the Comet People to beam him up or for Jesus to
come with a mighty sword.
In the wild, thinking of good ways to shortcut work kept
our ancestors alive. They invented tools. So
otherwise-unforgiving nature tolerated and even encouraged a
certain amount of creative laziness.
Establishing and learning complex truths, such as regards
fine details of biology or physics --the study of the real
world-- requires a great deal of work; ironically, people shy
away from this work for the same reason we invented tools. So
people invent /cultural tools/ to manipulate each other,
systems of thought that have no direct effect on the real
world, but only make them seem knowledgeable-- they seem as
though they have useful information, and so they are
respected. They may be paid in money, power, status or, in the
case of one's grandmother or circle of friends, in the simple
affection of the like-minded. They may be venerated, and so be
paid in all of the above.
Others adopt such a system, inflating its apparent wisdom,
which attracts still others and firms up a jargon and a myth
structure that includes an arbitrarily interpretable code of
behavior. This, with the occasional nudge from psychoactive
substances and fever hallucinations, is the entire basis of
religion and spirituality.
Then all the followers of /this/ Prince of Peace fall on
the followers of /that/ Lord of Light and rip and tear in
righteous fury, and if the interface between cultures is broad
and one group can't entirely wipe out or assimilate the other,
there's no clean win, and the fighting curls off in fractal
loops and continues indefinitely, like a nonspecific
infection, flaring up again and again.
(For many reasons not entirely --but significantly--
related to a lack of individual danger, populations skyrocket.
The more people in a like-minded group, the more the group
mimics a colony of microbes. Imagine an animated film of the
colonization and exploitation of North America, say, from the
year 1600 to today, sped up 10,000 times and viewed from
space-- 400 years in two weeks. It would look exactly like a
plate of North-America-shaped pie spoiling in the fridge as a
colony of mold spreads across it, leapfrogging to new areas
which expand to merge large areas of spoilage until the
present day, when the entire pie is covered with a gray-brown
mess suffocating in its own waste products.)
That's the long answer. The short answer to "Why do people
believe in nonsense?" --which is what you're really asking--
is either, "They've never learned to identify nonsense by the
utter lack of evidence for it," or, "They don't believe it,
and they're lying to you." Some people are less suggestible
than others, but everyone is susceptible to belief in
nonsense. That's why it's important not to rely on only your
feelings to determine how the world works. When it feels good
to believe something, that's when to start thinking, not when
to stop thinking.
6. Q: When I dream, it's always a nightmare and I wake up
upset. Why? And what can I do or buy to stop this? Can you
suggest a therapist?
A: Some people remember lots of their sleep-dreams and
some remember very few, but we all dream many times a night.
When you wake naturally during a dream, you're more likely to
remember the dream. A scary part of a dream is more likely to
wake you than a pleasant part, so it does, you wake up before
the inappropriate fear chemicals in your blood can dissipate
and the result is that you think all your dreams are bad.
They're probably not.
If you wake from a nightmare /every night/ or you're
otherwise rarely comfortable going to sleep, something might
be physically wrong with you. There may be poison in your food
or your environment-- that's true for most everyone but I'm
talking about an unusually high level in your house or
workplace-- a ventilation problem, say; exhaust gas from
heaters or automobiles or other equipment, or vapor from
cleaning products or building materials. You may be allergic
to something you eat all the time, or be suffering from poor
nutrition or gluttony (or both), or you may have one of those
low-level infections I mentioned above in my analogy of
religious infection to bacterial infection. These
possibilities are way more likely than that the problem stems
from a forgotten disappointment or --as the Scientologists
suggest, with a straight face, yet-- from your unconscious
humiliation at being poked in the nose by your father's penis
while you were still in the womb.
Try a real doctor. He or she can find out if something's
physically wrong with you by looking you over, asking you
simple questions, listening to your heart, palpating your
abdomen, and, if necessary, by sending sips of your blood and
urine to the lab.
And consider that you might not realize how miserable
you've come to be with the person you sleep with, and with
your life situation in general. Go somewhere else for a few
weeks by yourself; see if that helps. (If, for economic or
other reasons, you can't go off by yourself, then by
definition you're trapped, you're in a hostage situation, and
that's a very likely cause of uncomfortable sleep. Take
extreme measures; you have nothing to lose.)
Consider all this before you turn to talk-therapists.
Therapists are a misguided attempt to rent a friend. If you
really have no friends to talk with, exercise is always
available, and it's free.
That's right-- wearing yourself out physically doing
something fun almost always results in deep, restful,
stressless sleep. If you can't walk all the way to work, park
a few miles from home or from work, whichever is the nicer
walk. Eat more fruit, vegetables and multi-grain cereals and
less meat and dairy foods.
And avoid caffeine, alcohol, tobacco and other addictive
drugs. Addictive chemicals disturb your sleep not just because
they're poison, which they are, but because their levels shift
as your body tries to heal while you're in bed and for the
moment not smoking or drinking (we hope). Your brain can't
reach a point of equilibrium and be quiet.
Broadcast media are also pitifully bad friends; do without
them for awhile and see if that helps.
7. Q: When I tell others my dream, they sometimes say they had
a dream about the same thing. Doesn't this prove that our
souls are all connected like some gigantic psychic cellular
phone system?
A: No, it doesn't.
8. Q: But I dreamed that [people chased me; I showed up at
school naked; someone I love hated me; someone I don't know
loved me; I couldn't find something I needed; I tried to run
and it was like running in molasses; I fought in slow motion;
my child (sibling; parent; relative; best friend) was in
danger; I fell off a high place; I flew over mountains and
hills; my teeth came loose; my hair fell out; I talked with
someone who is dead; I had to complete a hopeless task] and SO
DID SOMEONE ELSE! [Or] I dreamed I was with my friend and my
friend dreamed he/she was with me.
A: Next.
9. Q: Something happened in real life and I immediately
remembered a dream from [last night; a week ago; ten years
ago] where the same exact thing happened. Isn't this proof
that time is an illusion and my spirit ranges over the eons?
A: No, it isn't. By chance alone these match-ups will
happen to millions of people every day. Chance also accounts
for when this happens to a single person again and again.
Everyone dreams many times a night, mostly about things in his
waking environment (and waking daydream-life), though skewed
and made strange by jumbling. Sooner or later plodding real
life will closely duplicate a dream and /that's when you'll be
reminded of the dream/. If this happens the day after the
dream, it seems amazingly psychic because of the timing. If it
happens forty years later, it seems amazingly psychic because
of the delay. There's nothing psychic about it.
And the feeling of deja vu is just a strong, odd feeling,
like the feelings of exaltation, sappy sentimentality, prickly
annoyance, sexual friskiness, etc. Feelings are fun but
they're not always appropriate. The brain isn't a clockwork
computer that, given a certain input, produces the same
predictable output over and over. There's a lot of random
firing going on in it as regards feelings, in real life as
well as in dreams.
10. Q: What can I do to remember more of my dreams?
A: Arrange your life so you never have to use an alarm
clock. Keep a notepad and pen near where you sleep, where you
can reach them without having to stretch. When you wake, lie
still, eyes closed, and relive your dreams. Fall back asleep
if you feel like it, then lie still, recalling and reliving
your dreams again. Then roll on your side and write a snort
note for each dream-- you only have to write the part that the
dream opens out from, the part that, when you think of that,
brings up the rest of it. /Trust yourself to remember later
what you remember now. Remembering the dream now, to write a
note, fixes the details in waking memory. It won't fade./
If all you want to do is remember, stop there. If you
enjoy writing your dreams for others to read, later when you
have time type the whole story.
11. Q: I have read about lucid dreaming. I may have had a
lucid dream. What is a lucid dream, really, and how can I get
one more often?
A: A so-called lucid dream is a dream of being aware
you're dreaming and in control of the further content of the
dream. You can program yourself to slightly more often dream
this, just as you can program yourself to dream on any other
subject you choose, by dwelling on it to distraction while
awake, by joining a group of people who think and talk about
it all the time, and by turning your waking life over to the
chore. And this is just as likely to result in dreams of
unhappily performing this self-indulgent chore.
Better to keep learning on a variety of subjects for your
entire life, read widely, play several musical instruments,
and do as useful, enjoyable work as you can find to do in the
real world, and so naturally more likely dream interesting,
enjoyable dreams.
-30-
unison
And it's a good read really. Sometime the mankind
attains probably certainty about existing doubts within
the current millennium.
*
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It is better to have a world united than a world divided.
But it is also better to have a world divided than a world
destroyed. Winston Churchill
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