How are stories kept a mystery in your mind? – A Whole Lotta Nothing

How are dreams ever unknown to us?

How are stories kept a mystery in your mind? – A Whole Lotta Nothing

I’d like to ask the opposite – how are dreams ever known to us?

I get fairly vivid dreams every once in a while. Sometimes, I can correlate them to events happening around me – some tension I’m focused on, some happy occasion that’s around the corner, etc. But most of the time, my vivid dreams are out of the blue. I meet acquaintances I’ve not seen in forever, I go to places I’ve never been, and once in a while, my wife stars as a detective in a story-line I have no way to make head or tail of.

But to me, these are not because our brains are trying to hide something from us, as Matt alludes to in his post. Dream narratives are when, according to me, our subconscious is able to surface ahead of our conscious mind. Our subconscious is always there, ticking away, firing off a million connections that make no sense whatsoever. Every once in a while, we have a eureka moment, because some connection is triggered that makes perfect sense to the conscious, and needs to be surfaced.

See, I think that our bodies do somewhat act as “a bundle of parts of competing systems”, but not knowingly. When we’re focusing on something, or going about our daily lives, the primary objective that’s driving our thoughts is survival. This can be of any order – from the most basic physical and ‘where will our next meal come from’ to a much higher level, such as thoughts about the future and metaphysics. But all this while, our body is going at its functions. Just as we don’t forget to breathe, we don’t forget to think in the background. It’s constantly happening. When we have a sudden urge to pee, it’s because our body realizes that we’ve been ignoring this function since some time and an alarm needs to sound. Just like that, when a great idea comes to us, it’s an alarm that some section of our brain sounds to let us know that the connections it recently created make some sense.

But when we sleep, our survival is in the background. If our minds were still preoccupied with urgency, we wouldn’t be able to sleep. So it is either that we’ve resolved the day’s urgencies, or our mind is overwhelmed with them and needs a break. For either reason, we sleep, and when we do, our subconscious’ plays come to the front.

Now, does it always happen that when we need to pee, or need to get up for an important meeting, our mind triggers a bad dream sequence to jolt us into waking up? I don’t think so. However, when those events happen, our mind does use vivid imagery, or fantastical scenes to inform us in its own way that we’re dreaming and need to get up.

As for the last question that Matt asks –

How could you even begin to design an experiment to figure out how stories unfold in our dreams?

I think the way to do this is to give yourself some tension. One time, drink a jug of water before going to sleep. Another time, worry a lot about some upcoming event and see how your dreams are different than when you had water.

I’d like to close by one of my most interesting dreams (there are a few I don’t think I’ll ever forget). As a child, I used to read Tell Me Why before going to sleep. On this particular occasion, I asked myself the question – “what’s the last topic covered in this book?” The answer was a three paragraph explanation of termites. I read it, went to sleep, and woke up in a dream where we had returned home to find termites infesting everything, from the large Eucalyptus tree outside, to every cabinet and drawer inside. It was not a scary dream – I saw it all matter-of-factly. Despite having read a single explanation about termites, and seen just one image about their handiwork, the vividness with which my mind recreated a termite invasion was amazing to me. It wasn’t out of any malice or urgency either. It was just the last thing my mind processed.

Mind’s Games

Few tufts of wind blow across the sky
pregnant with suggestion,
a stone on ground breaks it’s path
with every misdirection.
At once, the winds clear out
and all arguments fall flat in the face
In the second instant
without a hopeful trace,
into the murky vials of the unforseen,
the heart plunges again
there are no bounds then
to the stone’s cry of pain.
It’s not the stone
which chooses it’s fate
it’s an unseen ether
whose vileness does not abate.
The stone cringes
in search of peace
it knows not till now
a moment’s release.
There is no sadness
as the unknown,
for in it’s madness
it chills to the bone.
The stone is compliant
to the fancies of the wind
and to the dry earth
it remains pinned.
Nor move nor breathe
neither does it sigh in relief
the stone is fooled
into the farce belief
that there is a force
outside of it’s own
that causes the weeping
and the deep deep moan.
Will there be sunshine
in the land of the sun?
will we be soaring
or just trying to run?
What good does
self-obsession do?
When the stone can be
happy when left to!
The stone can see
the open skies
but it must have real,
not a potato’s eyes.
Let your heart fly
it has the strength
let doubt be diminished
to it’s power’s tenth!
There’s a ray of hope
in each moment
and it’s up to you
to grab it pin point!

Always remember, like Owen Wilson said in “The Darjeeling Limited

Francis: Dad’s bags aren’t gonna make it.

Sometimes, we just need to let go of things and jump onwards to the next journey. The only thing preventing us from rediscovering ourselves is ourselves.