The Screen Behind the Mirror

It’s nearly impossible to describe and talk about dreams. It’s because they’re so mysterious and no one knows what they are. As well, very few people can remember their dreams, and if you’re lucky enough to remember some of them, as soon as you try to put them into words, they evaporate. You end up feeling like you’re making them up, and not being honest to the original experience.

There’s many theories. There’s the psychological explanation, coming from every psychologist/psychiatrist/therapist.

“Everyone in your dream represents an aspect of yourself.”

“Dreams are simply neurons firing in your brain, randomly.”

No one knows what dreams are, and everyone has their own theory. Dreams seem purposely designed to never be known from whence they come from, what they mean, and what is their purpose.

Dreams also tend to reflect what you believe they are. For example, when I was into Jungian theory, all my dreams reflected this. I would have a dream, wake up, interpret them according to Jung’s theory, it would make sense, and then I’d go back to sleep.

At this point in time, I’m tending to believe that dreams are simply random firings of neurons, based on anxieties and worries you have during the day. My dreams are reflecting this now.

Other times in my life, I believed that dreams could be precognitive. So I also experienced this – I dreamt of the exact date of the San Francisco earthquake in 1989 and told all my friends (who were blown away when it happened). In my dream, I was watching a news report that told me the date of the earthquake.

I also predicted the volcanic explosion of Mt. St. Helen’s on October 1, 2004 - to the exact date. There is an entry somewhere in my blog that makes the prediction, although I got the mountain wrong. I thought it would be Mt. Baker in Washington.

So my belief is that dreams are what you believe they are.

I’ve tried keeping a dream journal. I couldn’t read my handwriting in the morning, because I was so asleep. So I’ve even placed a microphone/tape recorder beside my bed, and when I woke up from a dream, I’d try recounting it into the microphone. I just sounded tired and mostly incomprehensible when I listened to it in the morning. I didn’t have much insight, except for how different the experience of dreams are compared to talking about them.

But I had a dream last night, that made me think, I’ve finally discovered the secret to dreams. Trying to describe it will be extremely difficult. And my dream is hard to remember. But I’ll do my best. Perhaps I need to resort to metaphor. My concept isn’t new, in fact, it’s ancient.

Life is a dream. It is one great big dream, and on such a huge level, that it’s difficult to explain. It goes way beyond the idea of “life as a dream/illusion” that’s behind the plot in “The Matrix.”

Here’s a question, How many times have you woken up, to discover that there’s something new in the world, that you didn’t know about before? How many times have you arisen to discover that there is a unicorn whale, called a “Narwhal?” You may not be the most educated person, but still, after living for 40 plus years, you discover that a whale that exists that has an appendage that belongs to the mythical unicorn?

It seems that each year that I live, the world becomes more complex and more full of life.
To be continued…