Chapter 1 |
From the Introduction
Fifteen years ago, I was abducted---there is no other word for it---into the realm of the Dream. It occurred without precedent or preamble: One day I was going about my business, with its usual mix of high goals and low concerns; the next, I was cast away in a far country from which I've never quite returned. Before I knew that there are dreams and there are dreams, I treated them all as most people do: as nocturnal reshufflings of the mental deck; as fantasy and wish-fufillment; as psychic leftovers, those emotional coffeegrounds and crumpled-up impulses toward sex and violence the waking mind nightly ditches down the inner Disposall. But suddenly my dreams, ordinarily hazy and easily dismissed, acquired a jolting,technicolor realism. They gleamed with mysteries both opaque and insistent. Their meaning danced maddeningly just beyond my grasp."Weird dream!" my girlfriend remarked one morning as I washed up, shipwrecked, on wakeful shores, another traveller's tale on my lips. "No," I'd murmured, struggling to describe my night-sea passage. "A vision." ...Can we really believe in our dreams? We tend to deride the source of our dreams as "just your imagination," as a never-neverland without any practical value in the light of day. Though our national lexicon is rife with expressions like,"Believe in your dreams" (generally meaning one's ego-ambitions, though dreams love to knot the ego's shoelaces together), few of us honor our nightly fantasias. Dreams are condemned, like Rapunzel, to spin out their tales in an inacessible tower, their long golden hair never quite brushing the ground. We often suffer, the radical psychiatrist R.D. Laing once told me, from a sort of "psychophobia--- a fear of the deep contents of our own minds." Our horror films teem with cautionary tales about encounters with the phantasmagoric contents of the psyche. Taking dreams seriously is notoriously dangerous business (was not the "Son of Sam" killer also a visionary who followed his inner dictates to the letter?). We're not sure how safe it is to steady our gaze within, let alone act upon what we may find. If we consider heeding the directives of our dreams, we may easily wind up in Hamlet's metaphysical dilemma (which novelist John Gardner once described as whether to follow "higher law in an uncertain universe...on the say-so of a ghost"!). It is tricky business: Hamlet's choice leads to murder and mayhem: "The tragedy of Hamlet," noted Laurens van der Post, "was precisely that he always found a reason for not obeying the readiness of his own spirit." I've puzzled over my dreams, cherished them and run from them, and when I couldn't figure them out, saved them as one would an orphaned bolt in a junk drawer, wondering if someday it might prove valuable. But to take dreams seriously---enough to act on them, to live by them---carries a smell of heresy. Dreams smash down the barricades: They admit all, proscribe nothing, They insist on viewing life through a different moral aperature. They do not always flatter us: They are a mirror of human imperfectability, held before the face of our most burnished ambitions. They certainly may scare us: A nightmare is a perfect concrescence of our most private terrors. But even a purely exhilarating dream, a flight to the heavens astride a winged horse, stirs a different sort of unease---that we may harbor an unrealized greatness, a potential which, if we dared fufill it, would bring an end to ordinary life.
These days, I try to listen to my dreams, even for critical decisions, though even such a provisional reliance on phantasms may mark me for a fool. I can't help but see life binocularly, through night-eyes as well as day-sight, and this changes everything---my relationships to others, to myself, to reality in general. Some dreams, I think, are a form of reality. These are the kind that don't seem "dreamy" in the normal sense of the word, denoting things indistinct, wispy and dissipative. To the contrary: They suggest it is the everyday that is cloudy and evanescent; that it is the ship of waking life which yaws and drifts, lacking the rudder of the infinite. The closer I look, the more my dreams seem to insist upon the same preposterous onus: You must live truthfully. Right now. And always. In an era where everything is being mapped---every geographic feature from the highest heavens to the sea bottom, every physical object from distant supernovae to the last glinting speck of the human genome---dreams remain, by their very nature, terra incognita. They push at the edge of our limitations, urging us toward the wild boundarylands of the possible.... |
WHAT'S NEW******DREAM QUOTES*****DREAM GALLERY
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