Wednesday, July 15, 2009

TO SLEEP, PERCHANCE TO DREAM. OR NOT?

Researchers are still trying to crack the nocturnal codes of dreaming. MRIs and electrodes are being deployed in more than a dozen major universities. Results remain mixed. Or is that the right word....?

Mixed suggests we haven't locked in on any final explanations for how and why our minds travel these strange and forbidden lands. What makes the research especially difficult is that the portion of the brain which dreams is not the portion which remembers. And so that morning-after slippage of what just moments before we seemed to remember.

For centuries, seers have spoken of dreams as predictive of our future. For generations, scientists have spoken of dreams as re-constructions of our past. Dreamers are free to choose.

One thing, tho, seems certain. Awake or sleeping, there will always be those fragile, elusive realities that are hard to hold onto long enough to define. Why that detailed face last night that you're sure you never met...? Why those hazy faces you know you've met, but not in last night's ways and places....?

So many wispy un-definables in our lives. And the lives around us.

Like the loves we have chosen, the dreams we have chased, the fears we have constructed. We weren't born with these. We've somehow fashioned them by ourselves. Or maybe not. Are we simply excavating them from primordial genetic pre-dispositions like jackals fight tigers, whales mate, and apes socialize?

During the daylight, the human mind searches. During the nightlight, that same mind seduces. Luring us into preternatural, bohemian corners of existences sometimes never lived before. What we take back from there is just one of the extraordinary un-definables with which we are destined? or designed? to live.

Now that's something to sleep on tonight!

2 comments:

  1. I'm of the mind that our dreams are fertile soil for some of our best hopes and most bizarre fears. For centuries, people have been using their dreams in all kinds of ways. I wish I could remember some of them, but then maybe I'm just as glad I forget most of them.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Forgetting them may be a psychological blessing. They've already done their purgative work in your sub-conscious, and maybe that's quite enough. On the other hand, other dreams can be cost-free adventures into lands and lives you could never possibly visit in reality. I guess Freud was right -- dreaming is a mixed bag.

    ReplyDelete