I dreamt this morning of Hanwell station, though not Hanwell station - it was bigger and grander and located further west than in reality, a brictorian edifice modernised in the 1960s with BR Rail Alphabet signage, a BR-era cafeteria and lighting. Yet what makes this dream significant is the passages. To get to the platform from the Uxbridge Road, I had to crawl - on hands and knees - through a narrow tunnel under the tracks, lined with ceramic tiles. The tunnel was so narrow in places that I could feel my back scraping on its ceiling. I had to crawl quickly to catch my train... here and there, I had to avoid horse dung. How on earth could horses pass through here?, I pondered. Still, I pressed on, reaching the stairs at the end, at the top of which was yet another narrow passage sloping down to the platform.
In the photo below (courtesy of Google Maps Street View - an excellent resource for tracking down the topographic settings of one's dreams), we have the Uxbridge Road. In my dream, instead of the 'Advertise here' billboard there ran a tunnel cut into the railway embankment to emerge by the station buildings on the other side of the tracks. The station in my dream was located 1km the west of Hanwell station, and far bigger, with a smoke-filled cafeteria and wood-panelled booking hall.
The narrow-passage theme recurs in many of my dreams over my lifetime (as indeed do British railway stations). The narrow passage occurs in different contexts - squeezing onto a crowded Warsaw tram with extremely narrow, disfunctionally-folding doors up three or four very steep steps is one I've dreamt of several times.
Like Alice's rabbit-hole, the narrow passage is a metaphor - but for what? I have heard it posited maybe 30 years ago now, that such dreams are memories of birth, of the struggle out of the birth canal. Since then, the theory of dreaming-as-memory-consolidation has taken hold, but this is clearly more than the filing of quotidian experiences from which to form experience-based intelligence. [Although I must say that Friday's railway trip from W-wa Stadion to W-wa Zachodnia and reading a Wikipedia article about the Elizabeth Line that will pass through Hanwell must have set off the railway setting for the dream.] The narrow passage theme, however, is something atavistic - the universal state of being born - although the growing numbers of birth by Caesarian section (around 4%) may suggest that children born this way might not dream narrow-passage dreams. People born by Caesarian delivery who experience this type of dream often enough for it to become a familiar part of their dream repertoire would be interesting to talk to!
I shall be writing extensively during Lent about memory, consciousness and quantum physics, in a layman's attempt to bridge the gap between the material and spiritual. Dreams are, I believe, an integral part of the puzzle, the hard problem of consciousness. They exist, we experience them, yet they are ephemeral. Like the qualia we experience in waking life, dreams can be stored in our memories as fuel for further dreams. This enables the phenomenon of lucid dreaming, whereby you are conscious (in your dream) of dreaming, of being in a dream state, of experiencing familiarity in your surroundings and the type of dream.
The other significant type of dream I've had throughout my life is the 'disappointment' dream; in my childhood it was disappointment that a toy turned out, once in my hands, to be of poor quality, not the thing I had wished for, quite different to how I had initially imagined it. In my adult life, the toys have become cameras, with disappointingly poor viewfinders verging on the opaque, malfunctioning shutters, bits coming off. And the air crash dream - watching a plane crashing or falling from the sky.
More common to all of us though are dreams of being lost, dreams of falling from a great height, dreams of social awkwardness (being naked in a crowd, for example), dreams of being late. One regularly reported dream that I've very rarely (certainly not in recent decades) had is the dream of being chased by malevolent beings.
Neuroscience considers the study of dreams to be rather fringe and too subjective for serious research other than in the combating of psychological disorders; I believe that the still rather edgy area of consciousness studies will move us more and more into taking dream research seriously; after all this is something that we all experience and yet no one fully understands. It is one of those great areas that straddles the gap between empirical, reductionist materialism - we all dream, that cannot be denied - and spirituality - the quest to find our consciousness's place amid the eternal and infinite.
This time last year:
Foggy, icy, slippery day in Jeziorki
This time five years ago:
Hannah Arendt and the banality of evil
This time six year ago:
Snow scene into the sun
This time seven years ago:
More winter gorgeousness
This time eight years ago:
New winter wear - my M65 Parka
This time nine years ago:
Winter and broken-down trains
This time ten years ago:
General Mud claims ul. Poloneza
This time 11 years ago:
Just when I thought winter was over...
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