Dreams aren’t what they used to be.
Once upon a time, they had the power to invade daylight. Here’s Walter Benjamin, from the beginning of One-Way Street, published in 1929:
“A popular tradition warns against recounting dreams the next morning on an empty stomach. In this state, though awake, one remains under the spell of the dream.” Benjamin goes on to caution that unless there is a definite break between the dream state and waking life “the grey penumbra of the dream persists”, and the daytime and nocturnal worlds get mixed, leading to confused states of mind.
My experience of dreaming is the exact opposite of what Benjamin describes. Instead of worrying that my dreams will occupy my day, it’s my waking life that colonizes my sleep. My dreams replay daytime situations, often work-related, in scrambled form. In my sleep, I am worried about missing deadlines or meetings — just like when I am awake.
As a result, the whole romance around dreams — that they’re a source of deep psychological insight, creative inspiration, or even mystical truth, is lost on me.
But I’m not the only one. In the last few decades, it seems there’s been a devaluation of dreaming. Michael Cornwall, a Jungian analyst who writes for the blog Mad in America, remarks that we live in a strange, new world where “dreams have lost their place in fostering healing and enriching our personal growth." He adds, "most of my therapist friends and co-workers in the mental health field over the past thirty years haven’t asked for or listened to the dreams of those they serve.”
Owen Flanagan, a scholar influenced by evolutionary psychology, describes the skepticism about dreams more bluntly:
“Leave dreams be, the critic might argue. Dreams are of minimal importance to the philosophy of mind and to cognitive neuroscience because they are just a kind of silly-thinking; the mental analog of a ‘gurgling stomach.’”
But the closing off of the royal road to the unconscious is a dramatic cultural event, especially when you think of all the great artwork, poetry, films and mysticism associated with dreaming. So much so, that it makes me wonder if the devaluation of the dream is itself symptomatic of a larger historical change.
The Great Awakening, 21st Century Style
Perhaps our century is irritated with dreams because they are part of a larger problem: sleep itself.
In 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, Jonathan Crary describes a world where business operates around the clock. Day encroaches upon night. Just compare the number of hours we sleep with those of our ancestors:
“Over the course of the twentieth century there were steady inroads made against the time of sleep — the average North American adult now sleeps approximately six and a half hours a night, an erosion from eight hours a generation ago and, (hard as it is to believe) down from ten hours in the early twentieth century.”
It’s not just that people sleep fewer hours; there’s something almost shameful, or at least old fashioned (which amounts to the same thing) about sleeping in the first place. Crary writes:
“Sleep is an irrational and intolerable affirmation that there might be limits to the compatibility of living beings with the allegedly irresistible forces of modernization.”
With all the social pressure now exerted upon night time, it’s no wonder that my own dreams seem more like a continuation of day, by other means, than a search for some deep insight.
An Encounter with the Dream Police
In search of richer dreams, I once attended a Jungian dream workshop. If there’s any system of thought that still believed in the power of dreams, I reasoned, it had to be Jungian psychology.
To participate in this two-weekend seminar, you were required to write down your dreams. The Jungian approach to this exercise was more thorough than those of other dream workshops. No waiting for morning to jot down your recall notes; you were to train yourself to do so as soon as you had a dream — even in the middle of the night.
Judged by the vivid, bizarre quality of the dreams I captured, this method certainly worked. The only problem was that the dreams got increasingly scary. It was as if the dream state itself was fighting off my curiosity.
Worse yet, what began to occur was something like Benjamin writes about. I’d be at my desk, working as a copywriter, and freaky dream images from the night before would start blasting, uncontrollably, through my mind.
A particular nightmare I had during this experiment, though, made me wonder if the resistance I experienced to this exercise was caused more by the pressures of the waking state, rather than some mysterious, unconscious force.
In this dream, my street was flooded with police cars. The gumball machine lights at the tops of their vehicles were flashing furiously, as I watched from my window. I knew they were coming for me. And when they finally pulled up in front of my apartment and pointed their big flashlights toward my building, I noticed that these weren’t just any policemen, but skeletons in cop uniforms, with jaws locked in angry grins.
What law had I broken?
In retrospect, my interpretation is this: by altering my sleep (by waking up to record dreams), and inviting the distractions of night into my working day, I was in danger of hampering my productivity.
In a 24/7 world, that’s a very serious crime indeed.
