In search of lost dreams
In search of lost dreams
At night, I'm met by silence. Are you?
Every night, I lose existence. My dreams are empty of substance; meaningless loops and trivial encounters. In the dark, after a day of city and screens, I find that there may be little more to me.
In the 1983 Robert Irwin novel ‘The Arabian Nightmare’, a character suffers horrendous torture in his dreams every night, but each morning forgets of his torment.
What does it mean if I experience the most horrendous silence?
The last game I ever played was Valheim, a Viking survival game.
Only one detail has stuck with me: when my character slept, my screen went dark and descriptions of dreams were given. These were simple, short, and magnificent.
You dream of a river running uphill, of green shoots turning downward into the earth…
You dream of a great tree reaching out through the night. One half of its branches crackle with flames, the others are green with leaves.
You dream you are lying on your back in a meadow, gazing upward at the clouds. Your name is nothing, your mind is free of thought. But there is a warm hand in yours.
Such dreams could only arise from a life rich in beautiful experience. Could I ever dream thus?
Dreams have always been understood as a source of self-knowledge, a vector by which to unveil one’s nature and God-given fate, a means by which the unencumbered soul wanders out into the world.
Dreams have always been a source of mystery… They have been seen as omens, messages from the gods, and from the subconscious; from the soul and the self; from angels and demons.
— Rahul Jandial, This Is Why You Dream
If my dreams reveal little to me, it is troubling. To be clear, I am not asking for divination: demon-given views into the future. I ask only for reflections of the beauty of a life well-lived, for holy images and great adventures. And I suspect I am not the only one who wakes unsated.
God speaks to people through dreams, as occurs throughout scripture. But when He does so, it is unambiguous and unsolicited.
[Jacob] had a dream in which he saw a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. There above it stood the Lord, and he said: “I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying. Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south…
When Jacob awoke from his sleep, he thought, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it.” He was afraid and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven.”
— Genesis 28:12-17
Dreams are experienced during the two hours a night we’re in REM sleep. This means we spend a 12th of our time dreaming - or a whole month a year. Finding ways to increase their majesty, romance, depth, intensity, and profundity seems a worthy ambition.
This would not merely be an aesthetic achievement: dreams have a deeper significance. Our waking lives are not so different from a dream. In both, we wander through and with God.
As Pope Benedict XVI reminds us, our existence, wheresoever we find ourselves, day or night, is an extension of God’s thought:
…being itself is true, in other words, apprehensible, because God, pure intellect, made it, and he made it by thinking it.
To the creative original spirit, the Creator Spiritus, thinking and making are one and the same thing. His thinking is a creative process. Things are, because they are thought. In the ancient and medieval view, all being is, therefore, what has been thought, the thought of the absolute spirit.
Conversely, this means that since all being is thought, all being is meaningful, logos, truth. It follows from this traditional view that human thinking is the rethinking of being itself, rethinking of the thought that is being itself.
— Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity
In this sense - our dreams now seem ‘unreal’ to us because our sense of reality has become wholly fixed on the material. This must be resolved; these two planes of reality are perhaps less different than we think.
In dreams, we experience emanations of the self - of our own minds - but it must be recognized that our experience of waking reality is also conditioned by the contours of the self: by our preoccupations, interpretations, and instincts. To resacralize one reality may necessitate resacralizing the other.
For God does speak—now one way, now another—
though no one perceives it.In a dream, in a vision of the night,
when deep sleep falls on people
as they slumber in their beds,he may speak in their ears
and terrify them with warnings,to turn them from wrongdoing
and keep them from pride,to preserve them from the pit,
their lives from perishing by the sword.— Job 33:14-18
Indeed, in a spiritually barren time like our own, dreams may take on a special importance. There is a compelling theory within the field of neuroscience that creative and strange dreams - often representing radical departures from our daily lives - have a protective effect on our minds, in that they prevent ‘overfitting’ our psyche against the routines of our daily existence. In other words - they prevent our minds from becoming hyper-specified tools useful only for the precise tasks which we repeat each day.
Dreams must be cultivated and strengthened. I am quite serious about undertaking this as a personal project. If there is interest I will share my methods and plans, which I have begun researching. Please let me know.
I intend to end the silence of the night.
O God! Can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?
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Sic transit imperium,
Johann
When my children say their prayers before bed, they almost always ask God to bless them with good dreams. Such requests are typically absent in my own prayers, but after reading this, I’m now thinking maybe there is some wisdom in their supplications.
Tips for increasing dreams from a heavy dreamer:
- Get enough sleep. One has to put in the hours. Dreaming requires expenditure of excess energy that must be recharged by the very act of sleeping.
- Keep warm. Studies show that an optimal body temperature is required. Personally, I find that being slightly on the hot side helps to stimulate weirder, more fascinating, recallable dreams.
- Take adequate vitamin B6 - for me, this is 50 mg of pyridoxine hcl from time to time.
- Upon waking, keep one's eyes shut and explore the faint echoes of the mind for ten minutes or more. Often there are residual threads of dreams that can be grasped to pull up whole memories. It's important to not look around or think about worldly things. Seek and wait. Checking one's phone is a big NO.
- Don't use an alarm. Instead, decide when to wake up and then wake up at that time.
- Personally, I found that loading up on creatine also helps, perhaps due to the extra ATP, but it's not absolutely necessary.