Porcelain perch 1

Enjoying the luxury of a slow awakening this morning, I stared through the shower screen at an empty backdrop of white tiles, and contemplated.  There was no hurry.

I was trying to find a term for a set of ideas that were swirling around my mind.  I came up with the term dream-shadows, but I see that it’s already in use.  In the end, I decided there’s no requirement for a snappy term, just an explanation.

There’s probably a whole corpus of work on this in formal psychology and its cousin, popular psychology, so I’m not trying to claim anything novel, just sharing my thoughts.  Toilet-thinking.

People talk about dreams and reality as though they’re something separate and different.  I believe they are two parts of a closely interwoven whole – inseparable.  Dreams form a part of our reality, and the part they form is significant both in terms of the time we spend dreaming and the impact dreams have on our waking life.

If we’re lucky, most of us sleep for six hours or more out of every twenty-four.  Thinking of my own experience, a significant part of this is spent dreaming.  Most of those dreams are quickly forgotten.  Most of the time.  The dreams I remember most vividly are those that occur just prior to waking, when the veil between the conscious and unconscious is most transparent.  Street noise in Madrid gives me the opportunity to experience that several times a night.

Often, when I’m very tired, I experience intensely imaginative activity before I’m fully asleep, which can sometimes wake me up. 

Dreaming whilst entering sleep – the same transparent veil.

“Experience” is an important word, here, in support of any assertion that dreams are real.  However else they might be defined, dreams are events that we experience, like it or not.  Long into the future (hopefully) we will recollect things that happened during our life and, with some of those, it may be hard to remember whether they happened in our waking life or as we slept.  Reference the often-used statement “I must have dreamt it.”

Of course, what we recall is limited to what persists in our consciousness through the process of waking, showering, having breakfast and first contact with other human beings: partner, children, commuters and colleagues.  Most of what we dream is lost to the consciousness very quickly.

But what do we mean by lost?  Where has it gone?  The majority of thoughts and experiences we have in a day are quickly forgotten.  If they weren’t, we’d go crazy.  But a surprising amount of what we forget can later be recalled, given the right conditions.  It’s in there somewhere.  I believe the same is true of dreams.

These memories remain in our unconscious.  No one really knows how the process of recollection works – there are theories, sure, but nobody has gone in there and documented components and processes at work.  You still can’t image a memory. 

Given the right conditions, we could probably recollect the memories of forgotten dreams.  Given the right conditions, therefore, they could emerge autonomously.  I reckon they do – inexplicably affecting our mood during the day.

These are the shadows of our forgotten dreams: what I was going to call dream-shadows, but won’t.

As I said, these are just thoughts from the porcelain perch, transferred to the terrace of a sunny café.  But they might go some way to explaining my own moods.