The Stuff of Dreams

Some believe dreams are meaningless bits and pieces of imagination that manifest themselves in sleep and have no meaning to offer the dreamer. I'd agree that dreams are assimilated from innumerable fragments and often well guised, but I'm also convinced that nothing stored within and/or revisited in slumber by our subconscious is ever without significance and/or meaning. I think, instead, that dreams are our minds' avenue for sorting and resolving... it is only that the facets which comprise them often flit past our conscious minds so swiftly we fail to take full notice that renders their resurrection in dreams so mystifying.

The human mind is fascinating in that regard... not one of the billions upon billions of interfaces brought to it by any or all of our sensory messengers goes unnoticed and/or unrecorded within the confines of its conscious or subconscious memory banks. Were each and every such bit of sensory input to insist upon and be granted front row seating in the conscious mind, our brains would soon short-circuit and experience a total meltdown. Oddly enough, complete sensory deprivation can produce a very similar outcome in astoundingly short order. In both instances, the subconscious mind steps in as a protective backup system.

Dreams, I suspect, are constructed from all of the materials our subconscious stores when our conscious mind is too busy to deal with them; they are the progeny of orphaned input initially denied a conscious "say" in the matter of life. However, for a plethora of possible reasons, they demand to be reckoned with... most often when the conscious mind reposes in quiet surrender to somnolence. Whether they come to us as nightmares, seemingly nonsensical scenerios, or sweet ventures of the unconscious kind, every dream has a story to tell. Each, I believe, is a manifestation of desires, pleasures, pain, fears, etc. of which we're not consciously fully cognizant. When any of their number recur, be they good dreams or bad... is they that are most insistent upon conscious recognition and some form of reckoning.

My most frequently recurrent good dream is that I can fly. I don't have to "flap" my arms or use wings... I can simply concentrate and will myself to rise above my surroundings and navigate wherever I wish to go. Often, I retreat to a corner of a room and observe others interacting below... sometimes, I simply mosey about on the winds in a woods or meadow or over bodies of water. I always wake from such dreams feeling wonderful... and convinced that on some level, our souls can leave our physical bodies for a time and fly free with no fear of not being able to return.

Oddly enough, one of my most regular nightmares also involves flight. I'm always an emergency responder of one kind or another in such dreams, and actually stand transfixed watching a commercial airliner plummet from white, puffy-clouded, sun-kissed skies to earth. On responding to the crash, there is absolutely nothing I can do for any of the hundreds of victims of the tragedy.

I've had both of these dreams many, many times since young adulthood... and I've come to believe that they represent the alpha and omega of my greatest pleasures and joys - and most epitomical fears. In the case of the first... utter freedom, answers to troubling questions, and inhaling sheer beauty with every fiber of my being. In that of the second... ineffectuality, helplessness, and despair. Neither of their events has ever truly occurred in my waking life, and likely never will. Both, though, are bearers of messages my spirit must heed... and from them, learn.