3 Recurring Dreams
Clues for daytime self-understanding
Photo by Tim Grundtner
My dreams tend to be repetitive, and at their most vivid, during eventful, intense moments in my waking life. I’ve learned over time to regard them as clues to deeper feelings I may not be fully acknowledging, especially when my struggles require that I show a bold front. During uncertain times when other people depended on me and I had to lead, or when stakes were unusually high, my dreams at night would explode as though reveling in the freedom to tell my story — of vulnerability, of rage, of that fatal enthusiasm to see various outcomes to their dreaded ends, if only to satisfy a curiosity in the safe space of a dream.
But are dreams really that safe a space to explore an inner world we can neither fully know nor control? Is it safe to meet your internal other (or others), that “stranger (or strangers) within”?
The Vanishing Path
In my dream, I’m about to cross the road. When I do and I look back, the other side from where I came is gone.
Sometimes it’s not a road, but a lift. I take the lift to a certain floor. I step out and look around. When I go back to the lift, it’s gone.
Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, which puts the unconscious in the center of selfhood, caught the attention of the literati when his Interpretation of Dreams drew parallels between “dream work” (the process of dreaming rather than the content of dreams) and the use of literary devices. For example:
In dream work, “condensation” happens when several referents (like persons, places, ideas — remotely related, or totally unrelated, in waking life) are condensed into a singular image. Thus, an image in a dream can hold multiple, layered, even conflicting meanings. Just like literary symbols.
“Displacement” happens when a very strong emotional charge associated with an image (of, say, a parent, or a lover) is displaced to an unrelated, unexpected image. The connection between the source of the charge and the image to which it is displaced is usually incredibly absurd, or surprising. Just like literary metaphors or conceits:
“A conceit can be defined as an elaborate and fanciful metaphor or analogy, or a witty and ingenious comparison between two things which do not naturally belong to each other.” (source)
What we deliberately do when we read or write literature, we unconsciously do when we dream. We condense ideas into figures that teem with meaningfulness. We displace, disseminate, and dissipate strong energies to a myriad of more expressible forms.
Through literature and dreams, we get to live lives thick with description, expansive in their scope. Condensation and displacement deepen and move us along.
The Sprawling Attic
Photo by Ravi Kant
If rather than a vanishing path, it’s a vanishing lift, staircase, or ladder in my dream, I step out of it into unknown, unforeseen territory — usually, the attic in our family house. In waking life, that attic is very small and nondescript. But in the dream, it’s very spacious, a lot bigger than the house itself.
There’s no other way to it except through that vanishing lift, staircase, or ladder. Sometimes it’s a vanishing trap door, or a familiar room (like my childhood bedroom) that opens to the attic before vanishing.
In times of distress, I dread falling asleep and finding myself again in this attic. It’s always haunted in my dreams. Or maybe I feel it’s haunted because of the fear that grips me whenever I dream of it. In waking life, however, there’s absolutely nothing scary about the little attic. It’s brightly lit, filled with mementos we’ve chosen to not throw away. Its lone window opens to refreshing winds and a breathtaking view of mountains and the city below it.
So I find it quite absurd that this nice, sunny, little attic turns nightmarish in my dreams. The dream always begins with my stepping into it, and then going back to what brought me there, only to find it gone. With nothing else left to do, I walk around in the expansive dark looking for windows, doors, openings for escape. I inspect every room, every piece of furniture. I always end up exploring the whole of it, and the attic looks different with every dream — but I know that it’s the same attic, every single time.
I usually find myself out. Through a fire exit at the end that leads down to the garden. (In waking life, the attic is nowhere near the garden at all.) Sometimes, I jump off a balcony. Or a door shows up and opens to the road.
One night, I dreamed of waking up in the attic. There was no vanishing path, lift, staircase that brought me there. That’s the worst dream of its kind, and the last. I was making my bed in the dreadful attic. I retired in it, I lived in it. The bed was fluffy, glowing white in the darkness. Next to the bed was an open window. Easy escape.
That’s the last dream I had of the attic.
As I dream of vanishing paths to uncharted spaces, of stairways to upper rooms that change every time I find myself in there, in waking life I nurse fears of burning bridges, of cutting off reliable ties — of not being able to look back should things go awry.
Burning bridges. Cutting off ties. Don’t these metaphors function like my dreams of vanishing paths and disappearing stairs? Don’t they express in terms of idiomatic, commonplace images the many iterations of the same thing as experienced differently, and yet uniquely and intensely, by various individuals?
I also nurse fears of ascending to a familiar room, like an attic, and finding it to be not the compact and palpable room that I expected it to be, but a massive universe, an alternate world. I dread but also desire to make my bed in this room, world, universe. When I do in my dreams, and presumably in my life, my waking world becomes that attic.
And then, I don’t dream of it again.
Dreams, I guess, cease when they no longer are separate from life.
The Roofless Plane
Photo by Harry Cooke
Sometimes it’s the attic. Other times, it’s a village on the other side of the vanishing road. A village with many intersecting roads, many interesting houses, all of them with (sprawling) attics too.
I dream of getting on a plane without a roof, and flying over the village without a seatbelt on.
Sometimes, instead of a plane, it’s a staircase that spirals to secret planes in a building. Or it’s a lift again, but one that doesn’t disappear. It’s still there when I look back. The lift goes up and down, but also sideways, forwards, backwards. Like I’m in a roller coaster. Without a seatbelt on.
I rarely dream of the roofless plane anymore. Maybe because it’s no longer a dream. It has become a metaphor, an idiom, a common feature of my waking life.
My waking life has gotten so intense and unpredictable that nightmares have lost their function. When you’re living a daily nightmare, it no longer is. And nighttime reverts to that space of pleasant dreams.
These days, I dream of walking on beautiful beaches, of traveling to places I’ve known and loved. In these dreams, I know where I’m going, there are no surprises. An attic is an attic, a plane is a plane.
Perhaps these dreams will stop when I make my bed in this nightmare of my waking life. And the cycle repeats all over again.
When I make my peace with, and make my bed in, this universe of uncertainty that takes the form of sprawling attics, complicated villages, or crazy buildings with secret planes, perhaps my dreams of beaches just being beaches, streets being just streets — indeed, dreams of certainty, stability — will cease.
And with the cessation of old dreams come newer ones with new yearnings.
First published here on January 12, 2022.