For a while in my 30s, I would occasionally dream that I could almost fly. If I concentrated very hard while repeatedly bending my body like a shuttlecock and straightening out again, I could just inch my way above the telephone poles, occasionally higher, but that was it. And I could never sustain it.
Nothing gave out. Like running out of breath while playing a long note, I kept struggling upward, but it was no good. I would always descend slowly in spite of myself.
It felt like I could go higher, that it was possible, but there was always something lacking. Like those dreams where you want to make it down the stairs, or simply across the room, but can't, I could never get to the clouds, nor even move at speed. I could only toil to a modest height, even as my face turned blue with effort.
It sounds awfully tragic, but it never felt that way. I never saw anyone else flying, for example. I was always alone. Nor did I have the sense that I was being left out, that somewhere around me, others were flying as I wasn’t. If anything, it seemed my ability was rare.
But I never got the meaning of it, if there was one.
Not that dreams are portents, at least not the way they’re presented in myths. But I suspect they are windows to the psyche. Still, peer in any random window and what you’ll most likely see is something mundane, the casual anxieties of life: work, love, money.
Keep peering, night after night, and occasionally you’ll witness something greater, maybe even something profound.
Even then, I suspect Jung was right and we’re the only true arbiters of our dreams, not palmists or interpreters, not witch doctors or psychologists. Only us. No one else is qualified.
People don’t like that. They want a formula. They want Google to tell them what it means that they dreamt they were drowning, or had sex with their mother.
On the one hand, I have no doubt that dreams about missed math tests or standing naked in class are about the usual kinds of social anxieties. I had a dream recently where I cracked a window to shoo some flies only to watch them flee every which way but out, which is a perfect metaphor for the frustrations of book marketing (not least that it’s the kind of thing that attracts flies).
Beyond that, I’m not sure there’s an equation: Dream(x) = Explanation(y).
Dreams are not vocabulary words, where every meaning can be tabulated in a desk reference. Imagine if we treated books that way, if we thought every possible story was reducible to a flowchart and to find the meaning in any story we only had to turn to the correct page in the manual.
I feel sad for the people that want that.
We forget sometimes that story is emergent. Stories are made of words, of vocabulary, but scramble any book and in ten thousand tries you’ll get nothing but gibberish. Words in a particular order convey something greater than the sum of their vocabulary in the same way that the atoms of you, rearranged in almost any other way, make nothing but ash.
Dreams are not stories—or rather they’re not narratives. Neither are they fragments. A dream isn’t a middle missing an end. It’s a mountain submerged by the sea. Potent and mysterious.
Our best understanding from the sciences tells us that consciousness is a kind of controlled hallucination, that we are not passive recipients of sense datum but actually architects of our own realities, actively constructing them from moment to moment.
Sanity, then, is that part of our controlled hallucination that we keep in common with others.
If that’s true, then the reason our dreams feel so real is not, as we often assume, because our brain does a wonderful job of simulating reality but because our reality simulates a dream.
In other words, what our brains do when they are awake is closer to what they do when they are asleep than it is to the world “out there.” We are each Vishnu, asleep on the coiled serpent, dreaming the world.1
One wonders what would happen if we woke.
The End of the World Almanac
I call it the Handbook of the Post-Factual Future, and it’s a sort of newsletter within a newsletter. This week, I finished a piece I’m especially proud of on the nature of disinformation.
If you don’t already, you can get email notifications from the Almanac. Just go to:
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ANACHRON
As always, there’s a new chapter of ANACHRON this week. For those following the story, Quinn and Ezra enter the anomaly and make a startling discovery.
And finally, here’s this week’s picture of Henry.
That’s it for this time. Thanks so much for being here.
The coiled serpent even looks like a brain. I wonder if that’s an accident.