Spirituality and the Dream World: Lent 2024, Day 44

We all dream as we sleep; not all of our dreams are memorable. Indeed even those we do remember, few make much sense, being full of cognitive disjunctions, nonsensical mixtures of place, time, action and people. Track back the content of most dreams and you'll find some small particle of undigested information that crossed your consciousness during the waking day. Unprocessed by your mind, like an irritating grain of sand inside an oyster, that particle of information causes a reaction in your dream world. 

Example: yesterday, I scrolled down past yet another video short on Facebook of a family of wild boars crossing a road in Warsaw. This morning I dreamt that a wild boar devoured my tuna baguette and then proceeded to uproot my rhubarb patch (which I don't even have in real life!). A typical dream, then, which I know won't presage a wild-boar attack upon my garden (although I have seen them in by neighbourhood, and I did have a deer wander into my garden a week ago). However, I saw a dead hare on my walk today, so that's something.

Falling asleep is like going to the cinema not knowing what film you'll see, or even if you'll get to see a film. It could be a comedy or a thriller, it could induce irritation or boredom. The film could be starring you, or you could merely be an observer in it. It's this awareness that makes falling asleep interesting.

What happens in dreams can indeed be interesting, but as well as the action, there's also the qualia of dreams, the atmosphere, the klimat, the feeling, the texture of being there. Unworldly landscapes, strange yet familiar, that leave a 'taste' in the mind that can be savoured mentally over breakfast. Some can be summoned years, even decades, later. These qualia can be conjured up in the same was as qualia memories from waking life, though they are much weaker. Dreams are unique; you'll have a dream just the once, so the dream landscape is not like a local street along which you walk repeatedly in daily life. 

The dream world that we enter nightly is unique to our own subjective experience of what it is for me to be me, for you to be you. Dreams speak of our anxieties, personality complexes and hopes, but every now and then, I believe, they shed light on past lives. These are rare. In my experience, they are notable for not consisting of disjunctive cognitions, but are consistent in time, place and action.

This month, I've had two dreams of my old boss from the 1980s (who's now 93), in both he was with his wife (who died in 2018). Do these dreams have meaning? Precognition? I don't know. I feel that there's something out there, but I don't know what it is, a weak force, but nevertheless not one that can be denied or debunked as coincidence.

Intuitions come to you whether you are dreaming, dreaming lucidly, or wide awake. They should act as a signal to draw from  the future – by act of will – an optimal outcome. These intuitions do not serve as direct prophecies; rather they functions warning signals to heed, meaning "watch out for something, and to will it to go the right way." Or at least not to go the wrong way.

Twice in recent weeks I fell asleep wishing myself an interesting dream that night, and both times this worked. If you petition the Cosmic Purpose (or whomever you petition with prayer) in the right way (sincere, not seeking sensation), I feel you can summon meaningful dreams for yourself.

Shakespeare's Hamlet made the analogy between sleep and death, with the possibility of experiencing dreams after bodily death being given by the protagonist as a reason why not to commit suicide – because just as in sleep we remain with our consciousness intact, we may not be able to shake off consciousness with death. This struck me as a teenager on reading Hamlet at school that Shakespeare's artistic intuition knew exactly what's going on at the metaphysical level.

"To die, to sleep.
To sleep, perchance to dream — ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause."

The strange phenomenon of dreaming merits deeper investigation; I have habitualised writing down the more interesting ones, having my notebook open by my bed, with pen to hand. Typically, five or six a month are significant to merit jotting down, the occasional one ends up on this blog (see the label dreams and scroll down for more). 

Lent 2023, Day 44
The Purpose

Lent 2022: Day 44
Habit, discipline or obsession

Lent 2021: Day 44
Life after life after life after life

Lent 2020: Day 44
A myriad paths to God