The intricate complexities of dreams challenge the brain’s ability to process information. The dream from which I awoke this morning confirmed my assessment; dreams ignore impossibilities and cast aside conflicting experiences as if fact and fiction have no place in the dreamscape. This morning’s dream was among those one buries in one’s private, unwritten journal. Despite its demand for eternal confidentiality, though, it urges exploration of how the mind can so readily accept the impossible as if it were not only possible but commonplace.
For instance, how could one’s dreams accept without question boarding a wooden ship in font of one’s home and driving it along city streets to an empty parking spot that’s seemingly in the middle of a massive, unending prairie? And how can it then seem normal that the ship’s wheel has turned into the equipment used by a fununcular operator? Dreams often abandon logic, leaving it unused and gathering dust in the recesses of one’s brain.
Despite the fact that, after awakening, one notices impossibilities and illogical connections in dreams, their existence isn’t relevant and isn’t even recognized during the dream. Only in attempting the impossible task of “processing” the dream after one awakes do the fallacies make themselves known to the conscious mind.
I recall reading and hearing that dreams often represent one’s repressed desires and/or fears. I can see kernels of truth in that. But I’ve also learned that dreams constitute random shreds of data the brain attempts to organize during sleep. And I am sure I have heard several other explanations of dreams. The truth is, no one knows with any degree of certainty why we dream nor what functions our dreams serve, if any.
Dreams may arise from misfires of synapses that the brain attempts to interpret, using memories of experience as the means of translating or decoding those misfires. I doubt that explanation. In spite of the impossibilities in dreams, there are too many obvious desires and fears at play for random misfires to adequately explain the processes.
Damn! I wrote about six more long paragraphs, but either the Internet connection got dropped or WordPress failed me. Too much to try to reconstruct.
