The Physics and Metaphysics of Dreams

drwatsonsjournal:

ivyblossom:

Dreams are boring. Well, other people’s dreams are. No one wants to hear about them. If you really want someone to go away and leave you alone, start telling them about your dreams.

In spite of this immutable fact, I’m (probably unwisely) a big fan of writing dream sequences into stories. I like their disarming nature, the nakedness of them, the peek into a protagonist’s subconscious, and, to be perfectly honest, I like the opportunity to jump into a reality with a radically different set of laws gleaned from my own experience of dreaming.

For as long as I can remember I have been fascinated by dreams; not by their content per se (it’s generally pedestrian in the extreme, and not especially interesting or revelatory), but by the laws that structure them. I’m a fan of working out the physics and metaphysics of dreams.

Why do they work? Why do they feel so real when you’re inside them, but so ridiculous afterwards? The more I work out how my own dreams work, the more tempted I am to try to write dreams for fictional people that feel as authentic as possible. Of course, the only dreams I get to experience are my own, so my dream metaphysics may be different than yours, which will surely impact any feeling of authenticity. Maybe everyone’s dream laws are different.

These are mine.

The Startling Absence of Skepticism
As I understand it, the first rule of improv is don’t deny, or, as Tina Fey says: You must agree…For instance, if I say, “Wow, it’s great to be on the beach!” and you say, “We aren’t on the beach stupid, we are on the ski slope,” then the improv scene is dead. But if you say, “I can’t wait to get in the water, I hope it’s not too cold,” then we have a scene. We have agreed that this stage is now a sandy beach and we can keep moving forward. Dreams, I think, are very much like this. We are built to agree with what stage our subconscious sets us. We can’t question the stage.

In a dream we are sometimes living in different eras, we have different friends, lives, jobs, names even, and we don’t outright question any of it. We agree to the basic terms of the world we find ourselves in, the things that are presented to us as a given. Why do we do this?

In part, I think we’re driven to that acceptance by a series of dream memories that explain the strange things we see; if your therapist is a giant cigar, your therapist has always been a giant cigar, and that’s perfectly normal. Most of the strangest things in our dreamscapes feel commonplace in situ. We reassure ourselves so fast in dreams that everything feels normal.

The other driver of this dream acceptance is our innate fear of public humiliation. In a dream, everyone around us accepts everything they see as entirely natural, as basic facts of being, and to call it out (“But…birds don’t have arms!”) would be incredibly embarrassing.  No matter how outrageous a dream gets, the dreamer’s mental model adjusts. and the basic goal of getting through the situation without embarrassing himself or ruining his relationships remains.

The things we question in dreams aren’t usually the outrageous things. They’re the small things, process things. I had a dream once that I was an assistant to a medieval executioner, and it was my job to lead prisoners from their prison (which was a set of metal bookshelves) to the gallows. In the dream, I knew I’d done this hundreds of times, but for some reason I’d never really looked at the faces of the prisoners. Why don’t I look at them? That was a question I could ask. It was within the logic of the dream. So I looked. And I suddenly realized that I had been leading the exact same people to their deaths every single day, killing them over and over and over. I didn’t question how I came to be an executioner’s assistant, or why I was suddenly living in a medieval village. 

Dreams require the dreamer to solve problems within the bounds of their current reality; and it requires them not to question that reality. Not seriously, anyway. Even if they form the question in their minds, the reassurance comes to them immediately. Do I really have to walk across this lake of lava in order to go to the bathroom? Oh. Yes, I suppose I do, don’t I. That’s why the rent is so low. Well, alright. My general rule of thumb is to create as bizarre a world as I want in a dream, with outrageous, impossible rules, but never to have the protagonist seriously question reality, or even find it that remarkable. They can only wonder about what they’re going to do to keep from embarrassing themselves. They do their best to do what’s expected of them.

The Dreamer is a Backstory Generator
If you know you only dream for a few minutes at a time, why does it feel as though your dreams go on for days? At first I assumed that we think so much faster than we can speak that a short dream would naturally feel like hours. (I think this is the basic principle behind Inception, isn’t it?) But I now I think it’s actually narrative trick our brains perform. We create instant backstories, we give ourselves years of memories in a split second.

You suddenly know things in dreams. Whole histories. I’ve had dreams where very little actually happens, and I spend the dream looking at things and people and just sort of realizing things about them that knit into a complete reality. It’s as close to non-verbal thinking as I can possibly get; I just know the story, it’s just there. It’s just true, as if I’ve always known it and only just remembered.

A dreamer has dream knowledge and dream memories, and they appear instantly in relation to what’s going on around him. I think this is possibly the most creative our brains get; first inventing outrageous situations to be in, and then rationalizing our presence there, making instant sense of everything we see. A fictional dreamer has realizations everywhere he looks, and makes rational sense of all the things he sees, no matter how irrational. 

They say you can’t read in a dream. That may be true, but you can know what a block of text says. You don’t have to actually read it. Your ability to know things is critical and constant.

In fiction, the dreamer doesn’t start with dream knowledge. He acquires it by interacting with the dream. The more he interacts, the more backstories and memories he uncovers, and those backstories help him understand what is going on and what he needs to do. That’s the core of a dream.

The Omniscient Narrator
This instant knowledge sometimes takes the form of omniscience, which also never seems weird, irrational, or out of place. I once had a terrifying dream where I was walking down the street in a leafy suburb and saw some equipment sitting on someone’s lawn. And I knew, instantly, I knew that the people inside that house were luring children inside and torturing them. I knew it. I could see the whole history of it in an instant. The articles in the newspaper, the police search. I had no evidence of it at all, but I knew I had accidentally stumbled on them, and I knew that I had to get away, and that I had to stop them. How do I know what’s going on behind a door I haven’t opened? It doesn’t even matter. The dreamer doesn’t question how the knowledge appeared. It’s there, and it’s real.

A dreamer knows what’s going on inside people’s heads, too. I can respond to the things I know people are going to say or do. I suspect this is an aspirational thing; we want to be able to know what people are going to do. Our lives sort of rely on being able to guess. The dreamer can see people form the inside out. 

Intensity
I don’t know why, but emotions seem really unrestrained and intense in dreams. I frequently cry my eyes out in dreams, generally at things I wouldn’t cry about in real life. There is a kind of emotional earnestness in dreams, a kind of utter honesty. So when I write about dreams, I let characters have big, uncontrolled emotional reactions. They are more embarrassed, more sad, more heartbroken, more angry, more violent, and more destructive than they would be in real life. 

It’s difficult to run in a dream. Is that just me? I can never get up enough speed. I’m always walking horribly slowly when I need to run. My legs just stop working properly. It’s very annoying.

Sometimes you can fly in a dream. In my dreams, you can only fly if you push off the ground really hard. Like Superman. I think it’s perfectly fair to use bits of pop culture to help structure the rules of what’s possible in dreams. No one tries to be original in a dream. No one is watching but you.

Sometimes a Cigar is just a Cigar
Much is made about the symbolism of dreams. I don’t have a lot to say about any of that, except that we all know dreams are made of things we can imagine and things we know. They tend to have an immediacy to them; they are built out of the things at the top of our heads. If you’re working hard on something or something is bothering you, it’s more likely to turn up in you dreams. Your general emotional state is often reflected in how you dream.

When choosing things to go into a fictional dream, I try to think about what a character would be worrying about at that precise moment, or what would be new or routine in their lives. I never look up dream symbolism references to see what kinds of creatures or objects I should drop into a dream sequence. I think symbolism like that can only internal, created by a character’s own experiences. Anything can come to be meaningful, but it needs to resonate with them. The meaning has to be generated from within.

Metaphors can become literal; if you’re afraid of losing someone, they will turn to dust, or you’re realize they never existed in the first place, or they’ve turned into someone else. If you’re keeping your secrets (even from yourself), they’re written everywhere, on the radio, shouted from street corners. I like to focus on what would be the most embarrassing situation for a character at any given moment and work from there. Public humiliation is such a common fear that it drives a lot of dreams, which helps me make sense of all those “arriving at work/school and realizing you’re naked” dreams everyone has.

Old stress themes are good too; to this day I have this dream where I suddenly realize that I’m enrolled in a course and there’s two week left of term, or the exam is tomorrow. Immediately I start planning my time, convinced I can still read everything I need to read and pass. I haven’t been enrolled in a course of any kind for eight years now. Some routines and stress factors stick.

The specifics don’t matter, I don’t think. Sometimes we have the most boring of dreams, and I think those can have an important and revealing place in fiction, too. The other night I had a dream that I went to John Oliver’s house, but I spent the whole time picking shards of glass off his kitchen floor. The entire dream, that’s what I did. Shard by shard by shard. Be careful, don’t cut yourself, pick it up carefully, put it in the bin. Careful careful careful. Disclosure: I broke a pint glass in my kitchen last week, I hate it when I break glass, because I worry about missed pieces for days and days afterwards. I’ve been watching John Oliver replace Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, I’m convinced that must be a terribly intimidating thing to do, and I’m rooting for him. These are two independent things, but both I thought about leading up to that dream. The dream makes sense in the context of my life, but why on earth was I at John Oliver’s house? What broke in the kitchen? Why is it my job to clean it up? No idea. It didn’t matter. I don’t think I actually saw John Oliver in the dream.

I don’t think it’s the job of a dream to reveal something earth-shattering about a character. In fact, it’s probably the opposite; the job of a dream sequence is to show something mundane, to illustrate small fears, annoyances, a human desire not to be embarrassed, not ruin things. If you’re writing in first person, or and you want to dig into every portion of your protagonist’s experience, there’s two things I think are obvious to include: one, he’ll need to have a pee at some point, and two, he’ll dream. You can skip both of these things quite successfully in any story, but there’s something kind of charming about revealing both.

Well, I think so, anyway.

Interesting timing on this.