On dreams, being devastated by stories, and imagining the future (part 1)

"Pather Panchali," "Dr. Zhivago," "The Buried Giant," "A Time for Everything," and more

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To read Part 2 of this essay, click here.

Part 1: On dreams

A friend, an architect, once told me that she was always precisely herself when she dreamed. She was always at her current age, in her own body, with her own life story.

Her dreams were hardly ever narrative. When a dream was a nightmare, it wasn’t so much a frightening storyline as a terrible experience of wrongness. The physical world would go askew. The laws of physics would cease to apply. Rivers would flow uphill.

Another friend had narrative dreams, sometimes with dramatic plotlines; but while she experienced them she was also precisely herself, as she was that day. The question of whether she was ever different in a dream — a person of a different age, or with a different body, or with a different backstory — made no sense to her. It felt like being asked if she ever woke up not as herself.

Others I’ve asked over the years — it’s an intriguing discussion topic — have spoken eagerly about the different characters they have inhabited in their dreams.

For my part, usually I am myself in dreams, but reasonably often I am not.

Sometimes I am myself, but younger. Sometimes I am someone else. When I am someone else, I am almost always female, but not always.

Once, in a dream taken straight out of detective novels, I was a big, pot-bellied man in his 50s, a private detective in a Philip Marlowe-like story, chasing heavily after someone on the staircase of an underground parking lot. I was in my early 30s at the time, and not large or a man, but in the dream I experienced the physicality of inhabiting that body.

In another dream, also in my 30s, I was an elderly woman in the 14th or 15th century, worried about an unstable grown son who was about to take charge of a kingdom. I experienced the physicality of that body, too.

Once in a dream I was part of a friend group who had to deal with an alien who had arrived on the planet bewildered and lost. For most of that dream I was the point-of-view character. But for a few moments in the middle of the dream the camera angle shifted: the alien became the POV character, and for that handful of seconds I was seeing myself, the other friends, and the street around us through his eyes, which saw everything in strange colors.

That is the only time I can think of in which I was not the POV character in a dream, though there was another dream where I was a writer; the entire dream consisted of sitting at a table writing a first-person post-WWI novel, based on my dream character’s experience as a man who had lived through that war. When I woke up, only a few lines of the novel remained. I wrote them down immediately, and they were good, but the rest had vanished. Presumably my subconscious was trying to mimic the style of one or two male British between-the-wars novelists.

For a long time I regularly lived though wars or apocalypses in dreams, usually with one or more children whom I was responsible for. Those apocalypse dreams have ended now, thankfully.

Usually, no matter what character I am in a dream, that character is fundamentally me, the core me, as a moral, thinking person, regardless of age or gender or biography, in the same way that Kafka’s Gregor Samsa is still the same core him even after he has woken up as a giant insect.

But once I had an adventure/love story dream in which the two lovers at the center of the story were very different people from each other, with different moralities and different opinions about the extreme events they were living through. In the first half of the dream I was the woman of the pair; in the second half, where I experienced the same events as in the first half but from a different location, and where I made different moral decisions about them, I was the man. When I woke up I was shaken, not just by the events of the dream but also by the emotions and the conflicts between the different moral viewpoints that, in the course of the dream, I had fully inhabited.

I recently asked some friends to think over how much, on a scale of 1-10, they consider the things they have experienced in their most intense dreams to be in some way a part of their actual life experience.

One said 10 (with 10 representing as much of a life experience as something that one has actually lived through), for the experiences in a specific, recurring dream. Another said somewhere between 9 and 10 for the truly most intense in a lifetime of dreams.

A third replied that it would be zero, even for the most realistic or intense dream experiences; the dream experiences were simply not comparable to anything experienced in real life.

I think that for me, the most intense dreams I remember might get as far up the scale as an 8, but quite a few others would be a 3, 4, 5, or 6.

For everyone I spoke to, the emotions experienced on waking up from a dream counted as real-life emotional experiences, even though merely triggered by stories that our minds had created for us to temporarily inhabit.

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This discussion of dreams is intended to create a common understanding of what it means to inhabit a story, since it seems to me that dreams, while they are going on, are almost always fully inhabited (the exception being when one is aware that one is dreaming).

That will be useful when we turn to discussing inhabiting (often far from fully) stories that have been created by other people’s minds and turned into art, particularly books and films.

Part 2 (coming soon) will explore being devastated by fiction and the impacts of that, for good and ill. It will include spoilers for the books and films that it discusses, but there will be plenty of warning before the endings are given away.

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Update: Part 2 is now available.

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