Compos Mentis

We are such stuff...

I had an odd dream last night, and as I have been reading Freud I have found myself strangely interested in them. They may not be a window into the unconscious, as he claimed, but they are still worth understanding, certainly.
Sometimes I have dreams that are like Dali paintings: the physical world becomes strange and distorted, with objects acting in strange manners unlike their usual forms. Sometimes I have dreams like movies: as the protagonist, I just lived out the script that was set for me, and they would often end with a fall or a chase scene. Sometimes I have dreams where I am completely in control of what is going on, and the only way I can tell the difference between the dream world and the real world is that in the dream world I can do anything. No, I'm not ripping off the Matrix.
If we weren't asleep when dreaming, we would be considered crazy. The two are not at all dissimilar. Many studies have shown dreams to be a kind of controlled insanity, with random nerve firings at rigourously controlled times. Perhaps we have the advantage over chronically ill mental patients that we have a stable reality to compare dreams to, but for the most part our dreams are real enough, in the sense that the mind accurately reads the signals that it is sent by the nerve clusters.
The question "why do we dream?" is one that has plagued psychologists for years, at least since Freud, whom I believe was the first to come up with an explanation for why we dream what we dream. Many people and psychologists believe they have evolutionary value, but what that value is is the subject of controversy.
I wonder if we don't dream because we wish to escape. I wonder if our minds don't realize the bounds that we have put on them, the bounds of reason and rationality. We love to organize things into differing groups, to encapsulate them and to label them. Such distinction is foreign to the real world; the categories we place things in often tell us more about our own minds than about whatever it is we are trying to describe. I wonder if dreams are a reaction against such artificial thought, to let us know that there is more to existence than what we know and believe. We haven't found a better system to organize our thoughts, but the fact that there is an artificial system already shows its weakness in understanding natural phenomena, or indeed, any phenomena outside of what we already know, of what we already are.
Dreams remind me, at least, of days before I knew anything; things just were and that's all of what was.

posted by Emmett @ 16:38