Imagine a Porsche flying off an embankment and colliding with a gasoline truck. What does it mean? Is it important? Is it commonplace? Would your interpretation be different if I told you it was a scene in a movie? What would it mean then? Well, in Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise, Murray Jay Siskind describes cinematic car crashes as the pursuit of an ideal: “The movie breaks away from complicated human passions to show us something elemental, something fiery and loud and head-on. It’s a conservative wish-fulfillment, a yearning for naiveté . . . It’s a celebration. A reaffirmation of traditional values and beliefs . . . Look past the violence . . . There is a wonderful brimming spirit of innocence and fun.”
This, it seems, is a broad and apt sociological analysis, but what if the car crash were viewed in a dream — literally while you were asleep? Is it different then? An outdated theory says that humans process, deal with, and understand their insecurities and rationalizations during dreams — in dreams they confront what they’re forced to ignore during the course of their waking hours. A pop-psych analysis of the crash: the violence and explosion represent latent anger and insecurity, the car’s descent off the embankment is representative of the dreamer’s emotional plunge following the death of a loved one, and the resulting fireball is emblematic of the dreamer’s own fear of death.
It’s curious: such an interpretation would never be taken seriously if one were simply interpreting a movie, but dream interpretations, by dint of dreams’ inherent personalization, are imbued with a heightened sense of importance. This strikes me as a bit off. Dreams, though a vast and important aspect of human thought, are misused, misinterpreted and often given too much psychological weight. In part, we have one Sigmund Freud to blame for this problem — some of his misinterpretations are still ingrained in our popular conception of dreams. In one example, Bert O. States, in his book Seeing in the Dark, points out that the stereotypical symbolism of dreams (given to us by Freud) doesn’t work very well beyond sex. This is because human genitalia (which is supposedly the symbol of sexual feelings) has archetypal shapes, while emotions such as anger have no such concomitant shapes — cucumbers and hula-hoops can symbolize sex, but what symbolizes anger? And if anger’s not found as a concrete symbol, maybe it wasn’t a part of the dream . . .
Such a limited and frequently-applied toolbag can be directly credited to overemphasis on Freud’s theories, as can the idea that the subconscious is some sort of living entity “beneath” the conscious mind. As States puts it: “Many people still think of the unconscious in a fairly literal way, that is to say as a thing that, if unlocatable in brain space, is still capable of sending cryptic messages from some sort of a neuronic transmitter cruising silently in the dark alleys of the brain.” But this is simply not true. There aren’t two centers of thought; it’s all one brain. The best way to think of the process is this: images and connections are constantly happening in the unconscious mind and frequently they appear before the conscious mind via a neurological stimulus. The conscious mind then considers and either dismisses or embraces the images accordingly. But the unconscious is not doing any separate “thinking” on its own — it is a merely a storage repository of ideas and sensory experiences.
For example: you’re in the grocery store talking to a person you’ve not seen for several years, and then you happen to exclaim “Peanut butter!” realizing that, in getting carried away in your conversation, you almost forgot to pick up the peanut butter. This does not mean that your unconscious mind was fretting away, mumbling, “Peanut butter, peanut butter, we’re going to forget the peanut butter!” and was finally able to force the idea into your conscious brain. What likely happened was that some visual (or other) stimulus crossed you brain’s processing center (perhaps, out of the corner of your eye, without realizing it, you saw the proper aisle) and your brain, instead of (as it usually does) dismissing the peripheral image as unimportant, realizes that this image is associated with something you’d been thinking about recently. So, as a complete surprise, your brain retrieves it and you think, “Peanut butter? What?” and then you realize: you have to buy peanut butter, and so you shout, “Peanut butter!”
The unconscious doesn’t do “work” but rather associates what’s on the brain with sensory experiences in a haphazard and unconventional way, sheerly by random neural firings related to outward stimuli. When an interesting or worthwhile association comes along, the brain recognizes it and uses it consciously. And so when people say it’s best to forget about a problem (such as a complicated math problem) and let it “work itself out in the subconscious,” what’s happening is that the thinker is allowing the problem to be associated with all sorts of related ideas, permutations, and sensory experiences that the thinker has already consciously understood, but perhaps not yet put together in the proper sequencing. In other words, the subconscious doesn’t come up with new ideas, but only strange associations of old ideas — it uses what you already know as fodder for the creation of a series of mental randomalia. And, naturally, if you’ve been thinking a lot about a particular problem, aspects of that problem will come up frequently in the randomalia simply because the problem is fresh in the brain.
This is very similar to what happens when you dream. There’s not some midget, wringing his hands behind the scenes and directing the action, trying to create an interpretable narrative that gives a convoluted but unmistakable message. Rather, your brain calls up an image of one thing and then relates it to another (whether by obvious or unobvious means) and continues this process for a period of time. The images are related by the senses in unusual fashion — for example a grain of sand connects to a grade-school teacher for reasons that aren’t necessarily thought-out or evident. Meanwhile, as you’re watching these images, you think about them.
It’s peculiar: when you’re awake all sorts of imagines and sounds and so forth bombard your senses. You can consider or not consider them as you wish. Same as when you dream: you’re experiencing, as though real, a series of sensory experiences and you react to them as you see fit. You have a sort of dual consciousness and this is perhaps the most fascinating part of dreaming: you’re not controlling the images that come before you — they’re simply the scenery you’re living amongst and reacting to. When you’re dreaming, you are in a second world.1
A small sampling of some current dream research: Earnest Hartmann points out in Dreams and Nightmares that when a person dreams, he or she has thinner boundaries between mental categories than when conscious — unorthodox connections are made between seemingly unrelated objects. For example, when conscious, people generally think linearly, such as A leads to B which leads to C which then leads to D, whereas, when dreaming, A, B, C, and D are all interconnected and related on an equal plane — there’s no sense that one has to lead to the next and the next. As you may expect, this characteristic of thin mental boundaries can carry over into consciousness — certain people have much thinner boundaries than others. To stereotype, people with thin boundaries are generally artists of some sort, while those with the thickest mental boundaries are generally engineers of some sort. This might seem like a minor and obvious difference, but the degree of difference is rather astounding: the daydreams of people with thin mental boundaries are as bizarre and full of as many eccentric connections as the sleeping dreams of people with thick mental boundaries.
In fact there’s a test you can take, called the Boundary Questionnaire that tests exactly how thin or thick your mental boundaries are. The test is a modern-day melding of science, sociology, and entertainment — through it you can simultaneously learn about yourself, other people, and dreams. But, despite the existence of such new, science-based tests, there still exist tomes such as Julia and Derek Parker’s Complete Book of Dreams, which reads like a horoscope. For example, about brooch pins, the book says: “. . . If it was being admired in the dream, you may be pleased with yourself. Similarly, if you were receiving a medal for some achievement, your dreams are hinting that you are on the right track in waking life, and that you will ‘win.’ A brooch is often called a pin: in that context, someone may be trying to pin something on you, or to blame you unfairly.” The entire book is cross-indexed, and one of the authors (Mrs. Parker) has previously worked as a professional astrologist. Certainly, not everyone takes these sorts of books seriously, but plenty of people spend time with the books: they get published, and judging by how many make their way into the St. Paul public library system, they get read.
Which is too bad: tealeaf reading is entertaining enough, but it obscures the complexity and individuality of specific dreams, and ignores what’s actually happening as we dream. It seems most of us (including me, before I did research for this article) think of dreams mainly in terms of direct conduits to understanding concrete repressed desires on the part of the dreamer. Such an outdated understanding is a gross oversimplification — dreams, most researchers now believe, don’t relate to repressed desires. And while, of course, they do relate to the dreamer’s emotions, the imagery they produce is regurgitated entirely from sights, sounds, and memes encountered throughout waking consciousness.
So it seems that pop culture touchstones such as movies have more to say about popular and individual consciousness than dreams do. Which is why cultural commentators (such as the character Murray Jay Siskind), who interpret pop and spend time analyzing how and why people react to their surroundings, can come up with probing psychological analyses of people’s behavior. They deal with tangible, reproducible things, so it only makes sense — if you like watching car crashes in the movies and then you go home and dream about car crashes, which is more logical: 1. You dreamt about car crashes because you have some sort of peculiar death wish intertwined with a fear of high speeds and a childhood affinity for Tonka trucks or 2. You dreamt about car crashes because you watched a bunch of them earlier in the day? Presumably the latter, and it’s people like Siskind who get to the root of the issue: they study and try to figure out why you watched the car crashes in the first place.
Alex Starace (alex@professoryeti.com) has for years had a recurring dream in which he can fly.
1. This entire idea is described in full in Bert O. States’ Seeing in the Dark — much credit for this essay is due him and I’m here citing him as the major source in the first two-thirds of my essay.