SUNDAY, 29 SEPTEMBER 2024

In one of my poems, Painting the Sky, I describe a dream that I had when I was a teenager, in which I sat at the horizon and painted pictures on the sky, which then moved upwards and became constellations shining far above me. I had highly visual dreams like that quite often then. In another dream which has stayed with me for the whole of my life, I died in an earthquake in Mexico City. Even today I would feel very nervous if I travelled there.

Nowadays my dreams are very humdrum in comparison. I get quite a few anxiety dreams, but they never involve anything as remotely exuberant or colourful as painting the sky or as terrifying as being swallowed up by the ground. Last night’s was typical. I was trying to catch a train but I couldn’t find my ticket and I was rummaging around in my pocket while a ticket collector eyed me suspiciously and wouldn’t let me pass through the gate. I remember a little bit of colour in the dream – the train was bright red and streamlined – but other than that the dream felt totally monotone.  

I searched online and apparently there is strong evidence that we are less likely to remember our dreams as we age, and some support for the idea that they lose a lot of their vividness. Despite being in my dotage, I personally remember quite a few of my dreams, at least for a few moments, due to waking up needing to go to the bathroom during the night (isn’t old age wonderful?). But while the dreams I have nowadays may leave me with an uneasy feeling at times, they never feel meaningful in the way that the two dreams I described at the start of this essay did. None of my current dreams stay with me for more than a few minutes, and they certainly won’t spook me fifty years from now even if I do live to be a hundred and twenty (eat your heart out, Elon).

Our attitude to dreams is similar to that we have regarding children and pets: our own are fascinating while other people’s are tedious. But as a general psychic phenomenon, they intrigue me as much as ever. In a world dominated by physicalist beliefs, we no longer tend to see them as having any intrinsic meaning; people who believe that matter is the only reality will either simply dismiss the tales of Jacob’s ladder and the Pharaoh’s cows or offer rationalist reasons to explain them. Increasingly, dreams are not even accorded psychological significance: Freud’s dream analysis has been confidently placed in the pseudo-science bin along with palmistry and phrenology. The sense of mystery that we often feel when we remember a vivid dream has been replaced by various attempts at scientific explication: brain software cleaning up and ordering its files or transferring that day’s fresh inputs from short-term to long-term memory, or our conscious mind’s creation of stories in an attempt to make sense of electrical impulses that happened in the brain during sleep. Meanwhile, unsurprisingly, those one-trick ponies, the evolutionary psychologists, claim that we dream because it helps us to survive and pass on our genes.

What almost no one believes any more is that they are harbingers of the future. I have to accept that there is no strong evidence for this predictive power of dreams. As sceptics will point out, millions of people have millions of dreams every night, so it would be very strange indeed if none of them ever came true. On the other hand, these dreams foretelling the future generally feel significant to people when they have them. Many scientists would argue that this is irrelevant, but I find this a little insulting: if something has subjective meaning to somebody, then we should accept this subjective response as a psychological reality rather than simply dismiss it as a delusion. But whatever our opinion on this, it’s hard to see how we could set up an experiment to test whether dreams could have this clairvoyant potential: problems of veracity and trusting the recall of the dreamer; issues regarding what exactly constitutes a ‘hit’; other issues about how much time should elapse before a ‘hit’ becomes a ‘miss’; what degree of similarity is required for something to be classified as predictive; how to calculate the astronomical probabilities involved, and so on. The consensus among most scientists seems to be that it doesn’t happen because it can’t happen, which is at least consistent with a physicalist outlook.

But I feel uncomfortable about reducing dreams to mere function, which seems part of a wider trend to filter out the mystery from life. The resulting feeling is often termed ‘disenchantment’: a sense that all the magic is being squeezed out of our existence. But can we live without dreams, both nocturnal and diurnal? Regarding the former, science accepts that dreams are essential, and all the evidence shows that if our opportunity to dream is removed, we eventually become mentally unstable and begin to break down and hallucinate. Regarding the second kind of dream, I think few things express the need for these better than a stretch of lyric from Ruby Tuesday by the Rolling Stones: ‘Lose your dreams and you will lose your mind. Aint life unkind.’(words and music attributed to some combination of Richards and Jones, although the exact details are disputed).  I know we are speaking of a different kind of dream in this case – something closer to a wish or desire – but it is interesting that the same word is used for both phenomena and this suggests that there may be some kind of underlying relationship between the two mental states.

Even in the scientific community, there is some acceptance that mysterious things can happen in the course of dreaming, such as Kekulé’s famous dream in which he visualised the ring structure of benzene as a snake eating its own tail. The rather vague and catch-all concept of the ‘unconscious’ or ‘subconscious’ is then trotted out as an explanation, even sometimes among confirmed physicalists. Artists of all kinds, of course, are likely to actively turn to dreams as a source of inspiration (and other situations in which the power of the logical mind is at least partly attenuated, such as mind-altering drugs). This is an area about which we know very little and it’s hard to make any confident statements.

Then there is the phenomenon of lucid dreaming, in which the mind becomes aware that it is dreaming. It seems that many researchers in the field accept the reality of lucid dreaming and some experiments seem to confirm that communication can take place between a waking person and a dreamer. Much more controversial is the idea that two lucid dreamers can communicate with each other when they are both asleep and dreaming. Sadly, I have been unable to track down a book I read many years ago in which two scientists claimed to have communicated with each other during lucid dreaming and had proved this to their own satisfaction by agreeing on a number during the dream which they then independently wrote down on awakening before they made any contact with each other to check if their numbers matched (this was a stretch of digits, not a single number, and according to the scientists, they did). This would be earth-shattering if true, because it would suggest that the mind does indeed travel to some kind of ‘astral plane’ when asleep and that communication can take place without any physical medium such as voice or gesture (but such research is always open, of course, to the charge of being fraudulent since we have to trust the report of the people involved, so I think it would be far too much of a stretch to say that it constituted any kind of ‘proof’).

Another strange experience that I often had as a teenager but no longer have was suddenly knowing that I had previously dreamed the waking moment that I was going through. I say ‘knowing’ because that was how these moments felt; there was an absolute certainty that this was the case, even though when I look back rationally at the experience I realise that there are lots of reasons why this psychological certainty could be mistaken and many alternative explanations for the experience. I guess that it is related to deja-vu, the difference being that in the latter we have a feeling that the event has happened before in our waking life rather than in a dream. I’m not up to date on the latest thinking about deja-vu, but down the years I have read various explanations put forward by scientists, but I generally found them unconvincing because they depended on concepts about the brain’s experience of time that could not be verified or claims about neural activity that could be neither proven nor falsified. I don’t know if neurology has moved on now and feels it can make stronger claims based on activation of specific areas of the brain while performing a scan.

I suspect that we are a long way from finally solving the mystery of dreaming. For all the theories based on metaphors from computing and digital technology, it seems that, even if these theories are broadly correct, there is also a relationship between dreaming and creativity, so the idea that dreaming is simply the equivalent of sorting out our files and making sure they go into the right folders seems too reductive. One thing does seem certain, though: the mind, even the portion that we separate out and label the conscious mind,  is highly active during sleep, and especially during REM sleep. As a poet who retains a fondness for enchantment, I like that idea.