Since childhood, I have been blessed with vivid dreams. Even nightmares – powerful enough to wake me up – when they come, which is rarely, are interesting (here's a good one!).
Yet I dream those Big Dreams less frequently than I once did. For me, those increasingly rare 'past life dreams' that inform me of my consciousness having experienced life from within a different biological container at a different time and a different place, are fundamental to my identity. I have catalogued these dreams here. They are qualitatively different to the run-of-the-mill dreams, having no cognitive disjunctions, that is, following the classical unities of time, place and action. This category of dream has served to convince me that consciousness is non-local and immortal, passing through myriad biological containers on its eternal journey from Zero to One.
This rare class of dream co-exists with those humdrum, regular dreams. These are full of cognitive disjunctions (people and places interweave – for example my brother and my son frequently appear as a single character), the narrative switches – illogical plot twists – or the location jumps, from, say London or Warsaw. Then there are the regular tropes (losing my wallet or rucksack, squeezing through tight passages, nice things turning ugly and broken).
But even these are becoming less frequent and less memorable. I'll wake once or twice in the night for a wee and focus on that dream I've just had; typically it will be so confusing and so vague, and I'd have nothing worthy of jotting down in my bedside notebook. Two years ago, I'd have three or four dreams a month that I'd enter into the book. Now it's down to an average of one a month. Is this an age-related phenomenon? Or maybe the cardiology drugs I've been on for the past 11 months are taking the edge off my dreams?
On the other hand, over the past couple of years, I have become much more aware of the experience known as hypnagogia (hallucinations experienced between wakefulness and sleep) and hypnopompia (hallucinations experienced between sleep and wakefulness). I can now tell that I am about to drop off when my brain, unbidden, starts generating imagery of unknown human faces, fleeting shapes, landscapes, symbols etc. And waking up with a few bars of new music (nothing I've heard before) or unusual names on my mind.
Images left from Google Gemini, right, from ChatGPT
Our human stories, our tales, the narratives that have been telling ourselves for millennia, speak of great prophecies coming to people in dreams; premonitions of fortunes, of catastrophes; yet this is not our daily experience with dreaming. Rather, what comes to us in the night are nudges, small warnings, signals, signs worth noticing. Which is why I rather like Michael Palin's portrayal of the boring prophet in Monty Python's Life of Brian. "There shall, in that time, be rumours of things going astray, and there shall be a great confusion as to where things really are, and nobody will really know where lieth those little things with the sort of raffia-work base that has an attachment. At this time, a friend shall lose his friend's hammer and the young shall not know where lieth the things possessed by their fathers that their fathers put there only just the night before..." [Michael Palin, who coincidentally, appears in the BBC comedy series Small Prophets, out now.] That, dear reader, is now the Universe functions.
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