Perchance to dream?
Put up with it folks – Ms Raccoon is in whimsical mood, having just enjoyed a romantic trip down a moonlit river to a tiny village with a handily placed Chinese take-away, and the world’s best breakfast the following morning.
It were luvverly. Except that the MSG or whatever it is in a Chinese takeaway always makes me have the most extraordinary dreams.
Fear not, we are not about to go into dream analysis per se; more a question of where do the images in such vivid dreams come from? How do they get into our brain?
You don’t need to be Freud to figure out that when I dream that I have left Mr G in a hotel (next to a curtain factory where our curtains won’t be ready ’til the next day’? Sheesh!!!) in order to buy a packet of cigarettes that I haven’t smoked for 3 years – and then can’t find my way back again…I’m a) probably feeling guilty because he has mastered the sewing machine and made new curtains for the boat as a surprise, and b) I subconsciously fret that I might leave him somewhere and not remember where that somewhere is!!!!!
So far so mundane and explicable. As were the many street scenes I encountered on my myriad wrong turns, a mix of Marrakech and Istanbul – long buried memories dredged up from the subconscious.
I sat an exam once, a matter of six hours after I’d had a general anesthetic (long story) in Land Law – I subject I freely admit I have never understood, couldn’t argue my way out of a paper bag on the subject – yet I answered the questions so perfectly, (before falling asleep head first over the paper !!!) that my paper was sent for external marking…I was so spot on I could have been copying the answers out of a text book. So I understand that whilst you think you might not remember something you’ve seen or learned – it is in there, in your subconscious, and if it takes an anesthetic to let your subconscious rule supreme and ensure that you don’t have the capability to talk out of your backside in an exam, I highly recommend – anaesthetic!
But what about the bits I absolutely know for certain I have never set eyes on – the mountain I climbed that turned out to be entirely comprised of 1930s utility furniture, and the bizarre machine I found at the top that was hauling new pieces up to make the mountain higher even as I was climbing?
I would say I don’t ‘have’ any imagination. I certainly couldn’t write the sort of fiction that J.K. Rowling writes for instance. I write because I’m trying to explain a pile of facts – that’s not imagination. I’m learning to paint – by copying exactly what is in front of me – if it wasn’t there, I couldn’t ‘imagine’ it.
So how can my brain throw up images that don’t exist, that are totally fantastical, yet seem so real that you wake up shaking, unsure whether you were dreaming? – Where do they come from? How do they get there? If I was hypnotised, would I recount them as real life?
Can anybody tell me?
- Demetrius
September 23, 2016 at 2:34 pm -
Am I dreaming this? I find that muesli for supper has much the same effect, but that is a long story.
- David
September 23, 2016 at 2:55 pm -
Having learned self-hypnosis from one of the Worlds leading Australian hypnotists, I need to quell some false ideas about hypnosis. The more intelligent you are the easier it is to hypnotise you. People will low intelligence cannot be hypnotised.
- tdf
September 23, 2016 at 3:00 pm -
If you ask me, hypnosis is just the clever use of the power of suggestion. I tried it once during one of many failed attempts to stop smoking (I eventually succeeded, but not using hypnosis).
- Bandini
September 23, 2016 at 4:38 pm -
When the NLP thing was under discussion recently I found the following quite interesting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_H._Erickson#Handshake_induction- tdf
September 23, 2016 at 5:00 pm -
@Bandini
Can’t say I’m familiar with his work, but I’m not entirely prepared to dismiss its value.
“Now you need to know how to undress and go to bed in the presence of a man. So start undressing.” Slowly, in an almost automatic fashion, she undressed. I had her show me her right breast, her left breast, her right nipple, her left nipple. Her belly button. Her genital area. Her knees. Her gluteal [buttock] regions. I asked her to point where she would like to have her husband kiss her. I had her turn around [naked]. I had her dress slowly. She dressed. I dismissed her.[18]
- Bandini
September 23, 2016 at 6:11 pm -
Crikey, TDF, did you scroll all the way through that only to light upon the smutty bit?!? (“It is to note, however, that Mrs Erickson was present in the room.”)
It was this that caught my eye, something we’ve probably all experienced (the ‘interrupted chunk’, that is):
“This induction works because shaking hands is one of the actions learned and operated as a single “chunk” of behavior; tying shoelaces is another classic example. If the behavior is diverted or frozen midway, the person literally has no mental space for this – he is stopped in the middle of unconsciously executing a behavior that hasn’t got a “middle”. The mind responds by suspending itself in trance until either something happens to give a new direction, or it “snaps out”. A skilled hypnotist can often use that momentary confusion and suspension of normal processes to induce trance quickly and easily.”
- Bandini
- tdf
- Bandini
- The Blocked Dwarf
September 23, 2016 at 4:38 pm -
People will low intelligence cannot be hypnotised.
Bollocks! It’s just called ‘propaganda’. Ask that nice Mr Goebbels…or any passing Daily Mailer.
- Ho Hum
September 27, 2016 at 1:37 am -
What’s the point of being an Australian hypnotist if you’re going to have a failure rate of 100%?
- tdf
- tdf
September 23, 2016 at 2:57 pm -
“Billionaires believe in astrology. Millionaires don’t” – quote attributed to J. Pierpoint Morgan
- Bill Sticker
September 23, 2016 at 3:52 pm -
Imagination and the unconscious mind are strange beasts. We all have both, it’s just that many lack the time or mental discipline which allow them to translate what goes on in their heads into a narrative or painted image.
1930’s utility style furniture? I thought the ‘Utility’ era of design was mid-late 40’s myself, but it’s your dream,not mine. You didn’t notice any decent Art Deco pieces while you were climbing, did you? They’re quite collectable.
As for the images in dreams, all you have to know is this; Neurotics build castles in the air. Psychotics live in them. Psychiatrists collect the rent.
- tdf
September 23, 2016 at 4:01 pm -
“But what about the bits I absolutely know for certain I have never set eyes on – the mountain I climbed that turned out to be entirely comprised of 1930s utility furniture, and the bizarre machine I found at the top that was hauling new pieces up to make the mountain higher even as I was climbing?”
This bit puts me in mind of two Kate Bush songs – “Running up that Hill” and “Cloudbusting”.
- The Blocked Dwarf
September 23, 2016 at 4:03 pm -
I don’t recall in my smoking-banana-skins-washed-down-with-coke-&-soluble aspirin days of school boy drug experimentation that MSG has any such effect so I’m guessing the dog in your Sweet & Sour Alsatian was probably killed with an overdose of LSD or rat poison.
As to your dream itself, Freud tells us that cigarettes are a <phallic symbol, make of that what you will but added to the ‘left G behind’ thing , might i suggest he keep a closer eye on your emails in future - David
September 23, 2016 at 5:13 pm -
Another fallacy is that someone would do something under hypnosis that is against their moral code, they wouldn’t.
- Mudplugger
September 23, 2016 at 5:16 pm -
Entirely lacking imagination and creativity, I also lack dreams. On the rare, very rare, occasions when I dream, they’re never fantastical, nothing so thrilling as scaling Mount Utility or being mercilessly back-scuttled by a unicorn on speed, just unconscious versions of everyday happenings, featuring everyday people in everyday places. If boring became an Olympic sport, I’d probably snatch the gold medal without competition.
Maybe you should order me a take-away from that psychedelic Chinese and see if that loosens the constipated creative juices, then I can join you in that night-time fantasy world and see how the other half dreams. - Margaret Jervis
September 23, 2016 at 5:48 pm -
Of course you have imagination Anna. Imagination is ‘what if’ and that which allows you to paint by interpreting an image before you. It’s so fundamental to our being that we can’t recognise it other than in alien forms. Anyone can get ‘lost’ in a compelling narrative – and join the fray. Therapists do this trick of ‘lefthand’ writing and hypnotic ‘automatic’ writing to release alleged ‘hidden memories’ when really they are just releasing innate creativity – even if plagiarised from other things. Dreams are related to this – but I doubt anyone who ‘writes down a dream’ or ‘retells it’ is doing anything other than imaginative reconstruction. That’s how Freud performed his tricks. His dream scenarios were largely his self-fufilling story telling from the led fragments of patients. Who of course were ‘entranced’ in the process. Writer Stan Gooch had interesting theories of dreams in The Origins of Psychic Phenomena (2007). He thought it was something to do with neanderthal traces http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/books-obituaries/8110857/Stan-Gooch.html. Other people think it is functional dustbin.
- Bandini
September 23, 2016 at 7:10 pm -
A ‘functional dustbin’… I like this phrase.
Remember radio programme years ago about the great difference between man & beast: our imagination, and the role it plays in our survival/evolution as a species.
An example given was a cat cautiously crossing a busy road; its dopey owner may think it is a clever little thing looking out for any approaching vehicles but the reality is it almost certainly had a nasty scrape as a kitten – which it survived – and from that moment on has been wary. Without the real-life experience it could never have imagined nor fortold the danger, whereas the human can conjure up all manner of hypotheticals and adjust his behaviour accordingly.Perhaps it is this endless pondering of possibilities that leaves our heads brimming over with all the nonsense that, without a good nap, would drive us crazy. Clearing out the cache…
- Bandini
- Don Cox
September 23, 2016 at 6:40 pm -
What kind of paint are you using, Anna ? — Acrylic, watercolour, oil ?
- The Blocked Dwarf
September 23, 2016 at 6:50 pm -
You’ve not seen the ‘AR11!!!’ ‘tags’ all over Norfolk?
- The Blocked Dwarf
- Sean Coleman
September 23, 2016 at 11:29 pm -
When I was fifteen, after reading FW Dunne’s An Experiment With Time (courtesy of my mum’s library card), I used to rush every morning to write down as much of my dreams as I could and then look out for uncanny coincidences later. (Priestly used his ideas in his play Time and the Conways.) I had to do it right away or I’d forget everything. Most were trivial and occurred the next day or the day after. Over the last year or so I have tried to remember my dreams every morning.
For many years I dreamt regularly about running after a bus and just making it. In recent years I found myself reversing a car in my dream and I’d be going backwards very quickly only to wake up briefly before hitting anything. A colleague at work said she has exactly this dream. Lately I find myself back teaching in a schoolm a big one with lots of corridors, and I only find the classroom five minutes before the bell, and it starts all over again.
I tought myself self hypnosis. I’d close my eyes, go down a series of dark escalators and reach a ‘special place’. Once when doing it I insisted that I would remember whatever it was I was convinced was my secret fear. That night, or the next one, I was dragged out of my sleep, my heart was beating rapidly and I was filled with blind terror. I’d forgot that I had meant to do this so I didn’t get as much benefit from it as I had hoped. I have tried to do it since but it never worked. This morning, though, I got up late with the flu and while I was sitting down in the sitting room I fealt a twinge of that terror. It didn’t bother me all that much. I also overcame fear of flying using self hypnosis. You relax deeply and then you imagine yourself sitting on a plane and you are enjoying it. I did it two nights in a row before a flight about fifteen years ago and it hasn’t botheeed me since. The odd time I get a little twinge but that is easy to deal with.
The great pioneer of natural vision improvement, Dr William Bates, in his book drew a close parallel between visual memory and visual imagination. I think the imagination chapter follows directly the memory one. I seem to recall that he claimed that you cannot imagine something you have never seen before, in the sense that you can imagine something you have never seen before but the picture would have to be made up of various elements you remember having seen earlier and you assemble the bigger image from them.
A strange thought occurs to me just now. I wonder if we actually can *see* things which are completely unfamiliar to us. At the start of his book about his extended visits to the primitive Paraha tribe in Amazonia, Daniel Everett recalls how the villagers all assembled on the river bank pointing at a spirit on the far bank. Everett couldn’t see and nor could his wife or children. There could well be an element of this in Savilisation.
Rupert Sheldrake’s big theory is morphic resonance which accounts for phenomena such as blue tits learning how to peck through milk bottle tops on people’s doorsteps in different countries simultaneously, or the appearance of new crystals in different places and the inability of scientists to recreate the older form of the crystal once the new one has been appeared. This might help account for artistic imagination, I suppose.
By the way I think Anna is an extravert and JK Rowling is an introvert. I think the most imaginatively creative writers have been extraverts, from Kafka to Elliot to Pratchett.
- Ljh
September 24, 2016 at 9:52 am -
Sometimes my dreams lack all connection with my life but are very entertaining!
- Peter Whale
September 24, 2016 at 11:20 am -
Dreams are funny things. I remember dreaming of a house that I have never been in and having that house appear in subsequent dreams with me remembering the first dream.
What amazes me is when pondering a problem the answer arrives from within and was always there.
That “Eureka” moment is hard to beat. - Fred Karno
September 24, 2016 at 2:57 pm -
That cloud looks like Ireland.
- Fred Karno
September 24, 2016 at 2:59 pm -
And “That cloud looks like Ireland” Must’ve been on some good stuff.
- Alphamax
September 24, 2016 at 4:35 pm -
It’s the sign of a mitey brane Anna. I have three to four dreams every night, I can remember some vividly, most are a mix of people alive and dead that I have known , often involve endless searching for something , a car, a house and often extremely detailed. I woke up with a detective story in my head once which I wrote down thinking it would be a new life for me and it dribbled into nonsense.
A struck off shrink who drinks in our local said it was only given to the exceptionally gifted amongst us to dream like that and I’ll have a pint of Harveys thankyou.- The Blocked Dwarf
September 24, 2016 at 6:30 pm -
I’ll have a pint of Harveys thankyou.
A pint of Harvey’s Bristol Cream? A PINT?!? That’s very nearly an armful (to quote the late great Guru of East Cheam)….and then you wonder where your nightmares, not to mention the ‘washing machine’ in your gut the next morning, come from? And I say that as a professional alcoholic.- tdf
September 24, 2016 at 7:38 pm -
Speaking also as a professional alcoholic, a pint of Bristol cream strikes me a a lot of booze for one man.
- Alphamax
September 25, 2016 at 9:45 am -
Harvey’s Sussex ale ,one of the finest . The thought of a thimble full of Bristol Cream threatens to disturb my breakfast let alone a pint!!!
- tdf
- The Blocked Dwarf
- Major Bonkers
September 25, 2016 at 8:53 am -
Typical. You wait ages for someone to write an article about their dreams, and then two come along at once.
Still, at least Mrs. Raccoon’s dreams are more wholesome than this chap’s, who dreams about Brooks Newmark’s penis:
For my own part, I do sympathise. My own penis is a constant source of interest and delight to me, to such an extent that – like all men – I check that it is still in place every five minutes or so. Other people’s penises are of less interest.
Being rather square, and an asthmatic, I have never taken drugs, but I should like to take some opium one day, and drift off, Samuel Taylor Coleridge-like, and dream about lesbians; their smooth skins and supple limbs, light, questioning touches, and little sighs of pleasure. But I digress.
Back to Brooks Newmark. The mere thought of politicians and the uses to which they put their gentlemanly accoutrements is repulsive. Apart from Brooks Newmark, with his gormless expression of eager anticipation, one thinks of Simon Danczuk – with his apparent labrador-like enthusiasm to sniff at any skirt and jump on anything – and Keith Vaz, with his ‘poppers’, rent boys, and enthusiasm to be treated ‘like a bitch’. Even worse, however, is the mental image conjured up by John Major and Edwina Currie, or Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott.
I suppose that it is better that these people copulate with their own kind, rather than impregnate normal people. It doesn’t make the thought any less revolting, though.
Scholars of my work on this website, such as Alexis, will recall that I had the bright idea easier this year that, in order to avoid spurious claims of sexual abuse, men should tattoo their penises so that it would be easy either to prove or disprove that any complainant had at least had sight of any offending organ. This was clearly Brooks Newmark’s mistake: at the very minimum, he should have tattooed his penis with, ‘ Brooks Newmark’ and the sort of legal rubric one finds at the beginning of books: ‘All rights reserved, the right of Brooks Newmark to be identified as the owner of this penis has been asserted in accordance with section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.’ I’m sure Carter-Ruck could come up with something appropriate.
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