About Me (Part 002): Dreams
Dreams, Dreams
the buried strangeness / which nourishes the known
- Richard Wilbur, “A Hole in the Floor”
Ever since I was a kid, I’ve had dreams every night. It’s a very rare sleep for me if there is no dream. Even during catnaps on the couch, I dream. I don’t always remember the specifics of the dream when I wake up, but I remember that I had a dream.
The earliest dream I can remember having is a nightmare. In the vast, empty blackness of outer space, a giant T-Rex stood (or, I suppose, floated). It was slightly transparent. A long line of humans glided up and into the T-Rex’s terrifying mouth. Through the transparent skin, I could watch the people descend through the T-Rex’s body and out near the tail.
I woke up and opened my eyes. When I looked down the hallway to the other end of the house, I saw a bright light (the dining room window). To my night-stricken mind, it was a train rushing down the tracks toward my bed. If I didn’t go back to sleep, it would crush me. I closed my eyes. The T-Rex was still there. I opened them and saw the train. I couldn’t escape either fate.
I’m not sure what I did at that point. I may have gone crying to my parents. Or I may have endured the T-Rex on my way to other dreams.
On any given morning, my family would hear the question, “Wanna hear my dream?” At some point, the answer grew honest, “Not really.” I shared my dreams anyway. My parents sometimes accused me of fabricating story points just so I could keep talking. That may be. There were certainly times I lost the thread of the dream’s story, and I tried to fill it in as best I could.
Maybe the impulse to fill in the gaps was my first attempt at storytelling. I had the bones of a story, but not the sinews. I made stuff up because I wanted to tell a good story.
What’s strange to me about dreams is that they can have a beginning, middle, and end, but when I wake up, I can’t remember which is which. I remember scenes, but not their chronology. Did I go to the vacation house before I did the monkey bars? Was the bus going to or from the downtown shopping district? Did I play in the Seahawks game before or after going to church?
Does the order of events in a dream matter? Sometimes, I struggle to piece it together, trying to remember the transitional scenes. The order does matter, I think, and if I don’t get it right, I can’t understand the dream! Ultimately, though, maybe the order doesn’t matter. Each scene offers its own insight.
Is this not the same in stories? We don’t get a “continuous” narrative. We get the important scenes, the scenes that reveal the important points of the story. Sometimes these scenes seem disconnected.
Think of the Gospels. They don’t give an account of Jesus’ life from start to finish. They present episodes that illustrate the important points of Jesus’ ministry. The Gospels differ in the order they present the episodes, each for their own theological purpose. We’re not called to arrange these episodes in the “correct” historical order so we can establish the objective truth of the events. We’re called to attend to the words of the passage at hand, listening for what God might say to us.
Our lives are similarly episodic. Unless it is essential to the narrative, we’re not going to speak about each commute back and forth from school or work when we tell the story of our lives. We are going to summarize long swaths of our experience, slowing down to focus on certain episodes.
Dreams invite us to consider the episodic nature of life, of memory, of emotions.
Dreams are built by the emotions. That’s why I can be in my house, but it’s not my house—it’s my house as my emotions understand it. Dreamland is an emotional landscape. If I forget my dream upon waking, I can sometimes remember snippets of it when I replay my emotions.
Up until my twenties, almost every dream I had ended in a sense of longing. I had some mission to complete but didn’t finish. I searched for something or someone but could not reach them. I was running in a race but failed to make any progress.
I also got chased a lot in my dreams. Sometimes I would be on a “mission” and get chased off track. Sometimes the chase seemed like the mission. Like the hero of the spy movies I liked to watch, I would have to sneak into enemy territory and then escape. Sometimes I made it; sometimes I was caught.
I speak of these dreams in the past tense because about three or four years ago, the emotional tenor of my dreams shifted. I still have dreams of longing or fear, but now the majority of my dreams are what I would call “happy” or “accomplished” or “exploratory.” I experience joy in these dreams. I finish tasks I set out to do, and sometimes receive accolades from others. I can freely explore the emotional landscape without having to worry about being chased or captured. I’m not sure why the shift suddenly happened. But I tend to enjoy my dreams more now.
Sometimes I remember the words that people say in my dreams.
In high school, I dreamed I was in a two-story building shaped like a mushroom. I was on the second floor, all sorts of bright colors, with circles painted on the floor. People were milling about, almost as if it was an art gallery. A young boy approached me and said, “Life is not the answer,” then stepped on a circle and fell through the floor.
What an arresting, curious, troubling phrase! I’ve been pondering it ever since. It makes me think of Jesus saying that one must lose their life to find it. I often ask, “If life isn’t the answer, then what is?” Is it death? Is it love? Is it something else? Or maybe I’m parsing it wrong. Maybe life isn’t the answer because life is the question. I’ve written songs and poems trying to figure it out. I haven’t come up with anything definitive, but the journey of reflection is fun and interesting.
I had a dream more recently in which I wrote a song. All I remember was the chorus. There’s a lead-in solo voice that sings, “And the horse did say—” followed by a choir singing the title words, “Mind the hackles, mind the hackles.” Someday I’ll turn it into a real song.
I’ve never had a recurring dream. But one time I returned to a place I’d earlier visited in dreamland.
The first dream (second-grade-ish?): My mom and I were traveling together. We stood at the base of a large tree in the middle of a neighborhood roundabout. We ascended the tree, which had many forking boughs and branches. It turned out to be its own city. The citizens there did not like our intrusion and rolled a huge boulder (à la Indiana Jones) down one of the boughs toward us. We dodged it. Then the tree people welcomed us with celebration, as if we had proved ourselves worthy.
The second dream (fourth-grade-ish?): I was at a zoo, playing tag with my friends. After a while, we ended up at the edge of the zoo, but there was no fence or gate or anything. A dirt road simply went out past the crocodiles. I started running down the road and left the zoo. My friends shouted after me, but I just kept running. Eventually, I made a turn and found myself at the base of that same city in the tree my mother and I had visited. I climbed up and up, but nobody was there. The city was empty, abandoned.
This is the closest I’ve come to a recurring dream. It’s the only time I’ve returned to the same place in two separate dreams.
Of course, many real-life places show up in my dreams over and over. My childhood homes, various schools I’ve attended, churches, stadiums, parks, work. Even if they have a different look in each dream, my emotions know where I am. The city in the trees was not a real-life place—it was created in dreamland. So I guess what I’m saying is that it is the only dreamland location I’ve visited twice.
I’m working on a story (A Darker Travel) about a bereaved father who has a continuous dream night after night for a whole year. His dream takes place in heaven, and he gets a tour of the afterlife. Each night, he picks up where he left off the night before.
I struggled with how to depict the landscape of heaven. As I considered the dream-structure of the story, however, I realized that I could describe heaven however I wanted. Because dreams are emotional landscapes, the places in heaven he visits would be translated through his own subconscious lens.
So in this story, heaven is not portrayed “objectively,” but subjectively, through the subconscious of the protagonist. This gives me freedom to be imaginative, selective, and bizarre. And maybe I can mine some of my own dreams for material.
Recently, I’ve changed how I interpret my dreams. In elementary school, I thought my dreams were prophecies, predictions for the next day. If I dreamed about basketball, I would play basketball the next day. Of course, this didn’t work for dreams about riding elephants or falling-flying.
Later, I thought of my dreams as my mind playing out its stresses—that was why I had so many school-stress dreams. In college, I treated my dreams as allegories: this person represents that, this animal means this, a house means such-and-such. I never read any texts about dream interpretation. I caught ideas here and there and applied them as I saw fit.
My current interpretive mode is more introspective. It’s similar to the allegorical model, except that instead of interpreting each element as something external to myself, I view each character and situation in my dream as part of myself inviting me to pay attention.
If I’m getting chased or harassed in a dream, maybe it’s fear or anger calling for my attention. I read somewhere that when you’re getting chased in a dream, you can stop, turn around, and ask your pursuer, “Who are you? What do you want? Why? How can I help you?” Often your pursuer will stop chasing you and answer your questions. And it can sometimes turn out to be a revelatory moment. I’m running from my pain, but I need to face it. I’m trying to hide from guilt. I want to ignore my anger.
In 2022, my family and I had to live in hotels and temporary housing for 11 months because of a house flood that happened while we were on vacation. (Long story short: cold weather, burst pipe.) It was extremely stressful. Our commutes changed. We had very few of our possessions because we were in a 1-bedroom (and later 2-bedroom) hotel suite. We got sick every couple weeks, including multiple barfing illnesses. Our catalytic convertor was stolen from our car. We had a three-year-old. My wife was pregnant.
I learned I have a lot more anger inside than I realized. I’m normally easy-going, but it turns out there’s a lot of suppression that happens. When the ingredients are right, I can explode.
When I started reflecting more about anger (reading, talking to a counselor, writing, praying, etc.), I began to notice certain characters in my dreams acting like anger. It was surprising. I expected anger to be angry. But it wasn’t usually angry. It was often trying to protect something or someone. It may sound strange, but I had to learn to treat my anger with compassion. Only then could I understand what it was protecting.
There’s a phrase in Richard Wilbur’s poem “A Hole in the Floor” which describes my current understanding of dreams: “the buried strangeness / which nourishes the known.” To me, dreams are not just curious weirdnesses, nor are they prophecies or allegories. They are a form of invitation: my subconscious inviting my conscious self to reflect.
Dreams are strange, but they nourish me. If I can acknowledge the different parts of myself that arise during dreams, I can have a stronger sense of wholeness, integrity. Life involves learning to integrate our various “aspects” into our sense of self. And dreams can be a helpful partner in the process.