Dream Content

I apologize for the lack of customization. I’ll get to it when I find time. For the meantime, enjoy the visual and music I set up half an hour ago.

Some say that dreams are the paint brushes of the subconscious; they portray all of our hidden functions and thoughts through the most profound of images and settings. And yet, there are others who say that dreams are just random thoughts strung together by a weary brain, simply trying to get some rest (which I should be getting now). In this weblog, I would like to answer the question for myself and perhaps explore my less-private dreams right here, on this very page.

One of the major questions concerning dreams is: do dreams draw from reality? Apparently, Sigmund Freud thought so, otherwise he wouldn’t have written a 600+ page tome of dream interpretation (which I’m currently struggling through). But what do other people think?

F.W. Hildebrandt considers both options: “ ‘A dream is something completely severed from the reality experienced in waking life, something, as one might say, with an hermetically sealed existence of its own, and separated from real life by an impassable gulf.’ ” “ ‘We may even go so far as to say that whatever dreams may offer, they derive their material from reality and from the intellectual life that revolves around that reality...’ ” (Hildebrandt qtd. in Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams 43-4).

Which one is true is in truly in the air. From experience, I have dreamt of things I had done before, and I have dreamt of things that I’ve never experienced or thought about.

I’ll reveal one of the former to you right here. (From now on, I will provide context in the past tense and the dream in the present tense, since I’ve been told that it aids recall and helps immerse the reader in the actual situation [i.e.: the situation is replicated by the detail, time, etc.]).

Context: We placed first in our division at the first band competition of the year. The bus ride was a rowdy one; everyone was ecstatic, happy, and just so full of post-competition adrenaline. They were singing, and jumping around. Someone even did the “gauntlet”; they ran up the aisle of the bus as others tried to obstruct them. A friend of mine (referred from here on out as Mercedes, to conceal their identity) was nearly trampled in the process. It was dark on the way home...past 9 or 10 at night. Our bus was one of those yellow school buses... A few years ago, we had fancy motor coaches instead. Anyways, that was about two hours ago. When I got home, I wrote on my own weblog about the entire day, from start to finish. The entry was titled, “Dulcem Victoriam” (Latin for “Sweet Victory!”). I went to bed, putting my large blue Nautica pillow aside. “Nautica” was embroidered on it in skinny green letters, with a green fabric outline. It was the shape of a rounded triangular prism.

Dream: I’m sitting in a nice, comfy seat. It’s definitely not a yellow school bus. I look up and there’s a mini television mounted over my the seat in front of me, and several seats in front of that seat, and so on. It’s a motor coach. I look to my right, and I see my band friends. I see Mercedes looking at a suspiciously familiar pillow. It’s blue...and it’s partly green. But wait, it’s not my Nautica pillow. It has the words, “Dulcem Victoriam” on it. I keep my eyes fixed on it, as Mercedes passes it to other people. It’s gone. I look out the windows and it’s light outside...but empty. There’s nothing out there. It’s too quiet.

So, what happened that day ended up in the dream in some form. The blog entry title somehow ended up transcribed on my pillow. The pillow was one of the last items I saw before I entered slumber-land. In addition, Mercedes, the person nearly trampled over in the “gauntlet” showed up as one of the first people I saw in the dream.

Basically, this dream drew directly from the experiences I had that day, though it wasn’t perfect in doing so, as one can see from the pillow and blog title. Regardless, dreams clearly do draw a good amount of content from reality. It may not be from the reality you experienced a few hours before, but it still is from reality. In fact, Freud confirms this by mentioning that dreams often bring back past experiences (usually from one’s childhood, though I haven’t recently encountered a dream that did exactly that).

However, I’m under the impression that dreams aren’t completely linked to reality and our experiences. That particular dream probably took place in daylight and in near silence, which is contrary to what I had experienced: a night of noise. So, how did those details get in there? Why were they in there? Did they have any significance? Why was there nothing outside the windows? Why did I remember those specific details about the motor coaches? Why were “Dulcem Victoriam” on the pillow and not “Nautica”?

There are questions that have yet to be resolved and there are questions that have yet to be conceived. But for now, I can answer one of them and say that dreams most likely draw both from the random and the real.