Eight View of Dreams

Where do dreams come from?

Do they sneak up upon us when we rest our anxious minds? Do they sneak in and play on the idle machinery like children in a construction site, building mountains of sand and pebbles that fall apart by the next morning? I think they are the stray bits and curious thoughts of people who cannot care for them. People whose lives are too serious, and maybe they have the dreams that others are far too silly to concentrate on. I think they are rejected thoughts trying to find a home.

Dreams could be bits of the future, swimming against the gradual flow of time and entropy to lay eggs of wild thoughts in our resting heads. They could wither and die as their strange goals are met. Perhaps our regrets from times that have yet to happen flock to us when we sleep and try to push us towards a future wherein they cannot live. Would that make them suicidal? We may never know.

What if I told you that dreams were parasites. Purely conceptual creatures that grazed upon the left-over observations that we had not stored into our memory properly at the end of the day. They follow the moon as it circles the earth, much as fish follow the tides to feeding zones. Great hundreds of dreams might roam through your head each night and nibble at your head. Sometimes one or two will get trapped when they leave, crushed to death within the pages of your memory, and those are the ones you remember. They will have some of your thoughts left within them, but they will have the undigested observations of many, many more.

Dreams are mirrors of yourself, but actual living mirrors. Dressed in fantastically ornate clothing and perfect mirrored faces, they act out pantomimes of what your life could be. Like all mirrors, they are slightly warped and exaggerated. They describe your deepest fears, wildest fantasies and act out your most abstract thoughts. They regularly compete against and visit other dream actors when you are awake, and sometimes hold vast parties during certain cycles of the moon. This is why people go mad when they sleep under the full moon: their mirrors all leave and are replaced by those of others.

Dreams are actually the bits of fluff the fall off of great interdimensional beasts as they travel between strange stars. They are experiences that transcend our eight senses and have to fold into complex and disorienting shapes so that we can see them fully. We substitute the multifaceted eyes and rippling tentacles with familiar faces, and the howling void with fanciful locales. We go mad each night trying so desperately trying to reason with the unreasonable and understand the unknowable that we forget most of what we have seen and only remember what little we could comprehend. Perhaps our nightmares are just us seeing things more clearly.

I once heard a story that dreams are television signals from a parallel world. They leak in through the fabric of reality and catch us when we are most vulnerable. We are watching the soap operas and dramas of a million different worlds just like our own. Sometimes signals mix, and sometimes we get interference from the signals from our own world. It is difficult to say which and where any of them came from, or how their humor and culture could possibly differ from our own, but that may be.

In the beginning of the world, a great spider wove the night sky in place to keep out the sun at night. From the holes of the sky, we have the stars. Each strand is wound so tight that when the sky moves, it produces a note. Each strand is so long, and their notes so low, that we cannot hear them sing to us. At least, we cannot hear them when we are awake. Each song that they sing filters in with the starlight and fills our ears and sleeping minds with a beautiful, haunting song. These are interpreted in a million different ways, and each person may hear a different song from the same notes. That is why we dream.

Dreams are nothing more that our brains recycling information that they have processed during the day. As they shuffle short term memory into the long term, they reactivate the pathways that were used during the waking hours so that they can be transcribed into the long term. Each time you remember something, you are only remembering the last time that you remembered it. The older the memory, the more daisy-chained it has become, but what this means is that everything that we remember we have remembered in a dream. Dreams are our way of establishing memories. What we remember, we dream, and what we dream, we remember.