I don’t spend a lot of time trying to remember dreams or thinking about them when I do remember them. But the last couple of nights some dreams were lingering in my mind upon awakening. There always is something odd about dreams, unpredictable and often unrelated to everyday life.
Dreams have the power to mesmerize for a similar reason stories draw us in. With any story, we are beholden to the narrator, reliable or not. The narrator determines the warp and woof of the narrated world. In a dream, our mind is the narrator which doesn’t make it any more reliable or necessarily even familiar.
There is one major difference with dreams. The narrator is more hidden because the narrating mind is behind rather than in front of our dreaming consciousness. That might be the reason why identity of the dream-self seems so uncertain. It rarely comes up in a dream who I am. I simply am. The focus of dreaming is rarely on the self but what the self is doing.
More than identity, what defines most of my dreams is a sense of place, the world of that particular dream. That seems important. The dream-world determines the actions and interactions of the dream-self. So often dreams have carefully prescribed spaces that constrain choices and determine possibilities. I typically find myself in a building, a room, a hallway, a pathway, a street, a tunnel, a stairway, etc. One space opens up to another space, ever leading onward somewhere else. A sense of time in a dream is defined by movement and movement is defined by a change of location or vantage point, a shift in space linked to a shift in time.
It is like with vision. If you hold your eyes perfectly still in a perfectly still environment, your vision eventually goes blank. This happens because perception is dependent upon change, on contrast.
The world, dreaming or waking, and our movement within it determines our sense of self. Not the other way around. The sense of self is a secondary experience or rather an extension of a more fundamental experience, the waves and eddies on the surface of very deep waters.
This brings the nurture vs nature debate down to a more basic level of psychological experience. In a dream, there is no nurture vs nature, no external vs internal. Reality instead is a cotinuum, a singular experience: Being-in-the-world.
Marmalade 