I've spent the last couple of hours pondering dreams. I'm fighting off a cold, so theoretically, I'm just pondering fever dreams, but in this case, I think there's some use to it. Last night I had a dream that had many facets, none of which I'm going to directly discuss here, as it's personal, but I am going to talk about it in the general sense, so if that bothers you, go look elsewhere now.
When I woke up this morning, I thought I understood what the dream I had had last night was about. Sure, the dream had lots of moving parts, a lot of which could be interpreted multiple ways, but there were a few very specific parts that felt relevant to aspects of my life that have been gaining some thought traction lately. Instead, about an hour or so after I woke up, I had an epiphany that at least one of the things I thought was about something was about something else entirely, something older and much more distant in my life that I haven't really thought about in a long while. And it put me at ease about it.
See, I have a theory that dreams are, in essence, a form of auto-critique. The brain generates its own subconscious form of criticism of the decisions that the conscious brain has made, and offers insight that wouldn't necessarily be easy to grasp if presented in a direct fashion. This is why dreams tend to be oblique and obscure, with imagery often confusing and conflicting. People who've been dead for a while can be up and about, offering comments and thoughts on people they've never met, or never even could've met. Your dreams are, in reality, your brain attempting to come to terms with conflicting ideas generated from different parts of itself. It's easy to feel like your brain only has one path, but, for me at least, my brain has always been capable of holding multiple paths in active patterns. It lets me juggle a lot of thoughts and ideas all at once, but it means I can sometimes confuse the forest for the trees. That's why it's important to glance at the ideas put forth by dreams.
The brain is more powerful than people give it credit for, and it often does things for us without us even telling it to. It's easy to look at life on the surface and assume that's all there is going for it, but the best parts of life run beneath the surface, and the more you look at them, the more you'll find out about yourself, things you may not have realized without the help of your subconscious.
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In totally unrelated news, YACCS, who used to provide our comments, disabled their commenting system a few weeks back, and I've sort of been debating what to do about it. Lose comments we had from old posts or lose the ability of people to make comments on new things. When all is said and done, I decided that I care more about looking forward than looking back, so all the old comments are gone, and we're moving to the new commenting system Blogger supports. This may take me a little finagling to get working, but it should be functioning, if not in this post then soon.
When I woke up this morning, I thought I understood what the dream I had had last night was about. Sure, the dream had lots of moving parts, a lot of which could be interpreted multiple ways, but there were a few very specific parts that felt relevant to aspects of my life that have been gaining some thought traction lately. Instead, about an hour or so after I woke up, I had an epiphany that at least one of the things I thought was about something was about something else entirely, something older and much more distant in my life that I haven't really thought about in a long while. And it put me at ease about it.
See, I have a theory that dreams are, in essence, a form of auto-critique. The brain generates its own subconscious form of criticism of the decisions that the conscious brain has made, and offers insight that wouldn't necessarily be easy to grasp if presented in a direct fashion. This is why dreams tend to be oblique and obscure, with imagery often confusing and conflicting. People who've been dead for a while can be up and about, offering comments and thoughts on people they've never met, or never even could've met. Your dreams are, in reality, your brain attempting to come to terms with conflicting ideas generated from different parts of itself. It's easy to feel like your brain only has one path, but, for me at least, my brain has always been capable of holding multiple paths in active patterns. It lets me juggle a lot of thoughts and ideas all at once, but it means I can sometimes confuse the forest for the trees. That's why it's important to glance at the ideas put forth by dreams.
The brain is more powerful than people give it credit for, and it often does things for us without us even telling it to. It's easy to look at life on the surface and assume that's all there is going for it, but the best parts of life run beneath the surface, and the more you look at them, the more you'll find out about yourself, things you may not have realized without the help of your subconscious.
------
In totally unrelated news, YACCS, who used to provide our comments, disabled their commenting system a few weeks back, and I've sort of been debating what to do about it. Lose comments we had from old posts or lose the ability of people to make comments on new things. When all is said and done, I decided that I care more about looking forward than looking back, so all the old comments are gone, and we're moving to the new commenting system Blogger supports. This may take me a little finagling to get working, but it should be functioning, if not in this post then soon.
Labels: blog changes, dreams, philosophy, subconscious, thought theory
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