Such is the Nature of Dreams
I had a most incredible dream. It was so vivid, I woke up remembering every detail. I will share the dream here, not so much for the content, which you’d probably find hilarious, but for what I took away from reflecting upon it.
The Dream
I am in an enormous house. It is white and grand. I had come there to attend a party, and the sun was setting. An overwhelming feeling that the area isn’t safe compels me to leave early. I find myself at the gates waiting for a bus to take me home. I see one, just around the corner. So I walk there. In my hands, I carry a suitcase and a dog. When I get to the bus, I drop my suitcase on the seat of the bus and make to take out money from the suitcase when the passengers start to look at me suspiciously. I feel uncomfortable taking the money out. Suddenly, I feel a splash of water on my back. I turn to see two young schoolboys about 5 years of age running away. I run after them but change my mind halfway into the run only to return to find that the bus had left and my bag was still in it. Confused, I run in the direction I believe the bus must’ve gone but all I see is a lonely road stretching all the way to the horizon.
So, I decide to find a Police station and file a complaint.
At the Police station, I see a cousin I hadn’t seen in a while. She asks me what I am doing there, and we sit outside the Police station to talk. While talking to her, I look to my right and beside me is the suitcase I’d left in the bus. I feel a sense of relief, but it won’t last long as I remembered the dog I’d had with me. Where did I leave it? I run back to the bus shelter and find it limp and lifeless by the roadside. Immediately, I pick it up and try to resuscitate it. It won’t wake up. Then I see a muddy puddle by the roadside. It is all I have. So, I scoop some water from the mud puddle and put it to the dog’s mouth. It drinks slowly at first, then it colours back from grey as it drinks even more to my relief.
“I must get out of here,” I say to myself. Then I remember I had forgotten something back at the house. I had to go back and get it.
Back in the house, the party was over and the lights in the house were still on so I thought, let me switch it off. As I switched off the lights, a loud noise erupted in complaint from the darkness. I switched it back on again to find many people in the living room that earlier had been empty.
Eventually, I leave the house, walk a great distance and end up on a narrow street facing a windowless house where many people are sitting facing my direction but weirdly, not looking at me. I would later get to a river with sparkling clean water, so clear you could see the fish at the bottom and it almost swept me off my feet as I stared at the fish in admiration. I would see my children and my brother on the way telling me they were going back to that same house to take something they had forgotten there and I would tell them to forget about what they’d left behind and let us go home. In all this topsy-turvy, despite my innermost instincts warning me about how nightfall shouldn’t catch me in this unseen place, I won’t eventually find my way back home until my eyes opened to reality.
The Reflection
I’ve never had a dream so vivid or so unforgettable and I am not one to employ the supernatural in trying to understand it. But many years ago, I read a book on dreams and psychoanalysis and I recall something the author had said, that dreams were designed to keep us asleep — a way our mind entertains us till morning. Because our sanity is tied to getting adequate rest, our mind needs to protect us from going mad by telling us stories through dreams. Despite not being a psychoanalyst, I have found some truth in this by reflecting on my dreams for over 30 years. From the loop-storied dreams such as the one I shared here that keeps taking you round and round till you wake; to the relatable dreams of every bedwetter, where one is standing in a field or in any other place, and feels a need to relieve oneself. And as one does, one wakes to that ever agonizing wetness of yet another failed attempt at beating incontinence. To the dreams of sitting at an exam one is unprepared for; or the dreams that call upon reality to make its story complete, such as when there is shouting or knocking outside the world of your dreams and your mind scripts it into your dream’s narrative until the insistence of reality wakes you up.
And then there are the dreams where a force presses down your soul into your body and you keep trying to get up or shout but you can’t find your voice. Or the repetitive one I would have through my teenage years, where an old woman in white keeps reminding me that I would not live longer than 30. Regardless of the dream, eventually I open my eyes and I breathe, lucky to still be here.
I don’t know the spiritual dimensions of these dreams and the thought patterns that form them, but I have come to accept the psychoanalytical explanation that my dreams are designed to both entertain and protect me, and at a certain level, connect me with the spiritual … until the day when my dream will go on and on, and I will not wake from it.
As I reflected on this rigmarole of a dream (as shared above), something struck me — and it is what inspired this article. That dreams (now defined as ideas, visions or plans) also follow the same patterns. They have a way of keeping us in that world of illusion, spinning endless reasons for us not to get to our destination so we don’t wake up. Yet, not to wake from a dream is death — both literally and figuratively.
We have thoughts, ideas, visions and dreams of how to change the world around us, how to build new things and solve complex problems. Our imagination lends us a hand and we connect the dots, but at some point in the musing and analyzing and theorizing, we must wake up and do. Doing is the reality of dreams. Don’t get stuck inside your head. Don’t hold on to that idea from longer than necessary. Don’t dream those fantastic schemes endlessly. Do. Otherwise, you’ll die.
And for the doer, when you have begun doing, don’t stop to sleep and dream again. Don’t lose your reality to the attraction of endlessly dreaming. Be conscious on the journey to doing, because surrounding your lonely path are auroras so alluring, they’ll draw you back into the comfort of complacent thoughts; and wrap you in the warm embrace of inertia, in the palaces of ether inside your head.
It is okay to dream but you must wake up, even when you don’t get to your destination in your dreams. If you don’t wake up, you are dead.
Ire o!
Osundolire Ifelanwa
