A good night’s sleep is
always a sleep without dreams. I
occasionally dream. Often my dreams take
place in some Native village similar to where my wife and I spent so many years.
Last night, however, the
dream was surreal: I opened the trunk of a sixties vintage car and inside was a
raw egg. Not just a regular raw egg, but
this one filled the entire trunk - with a yoke the side of a spare
tire…then I woke up.
Dreams have haunted the
nights of men from the earliest days of mankind. The Babylonians, the Egyptians and the Greeks
have all pondered the meaning of dream sequences.
Many Native cultures from the
Australian aborigines to the Indians of the American south west have viewed
dreams as an insight from another realm.
Even animals dream. Anyone with a dog has occasionally seen it
asleep with its eyes fluttering and feet moving in rapid motion.
Sigmund Freud published The
Interpretation of Dreams, and believed dreams were connected to daily dramas
unknowingly recorded by our id.
There have always been those
who would tell us the meaning of our dreams:
In Fiddler on the Roof Tevye’s
wife interprets: ‘Tell me what you dreamt and I’ll tell you what it meant. '
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Who among us has not had that
creepy moment where we walk into a place or scene for the first time and have a
feeling of recognition? Could this be
our id relating to a similar scene from sometimes in our past - something we dreamed - or a moment
where we briefly glimpse into some parallel universe a hairs breath away?
Hamlet’s fear of death is ‘what
dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us
pause.’
I don’t place any importance on
dreams: they are chaotic and out of our control. We are now coming to understand that our
brain is an organic computer; one that we have only minor command - of what goes
in and what comes out. This computer is
operating twenty-four hours a day for our entire life – downloading, deleting
and storing masses of information beyond our conscious management.
Then, when we sleep this system runs from
random memory – and often we dream from flashes of synapse firing randomly.
But the question is: Why a
raw egg the size of a giant pumpkin in the trunk of an old muscle car?
I’m just asking.
the Ol’Buzzard
