"We dream - it is good we are dreaming -/ It would hurt us were we awake..." - Emily Dickinson
But aren't we awake? Maybe not.
Plato appeared in my high school classroom long ago with this sentence: "All of life is a dream." Ever since, I've wondered if he was right.
Dreams always seem real when you are in them even if you have some awareness that you are dreaming. Yet, they are always fantastical - inconsistent with what we think of as the reality of our everyday world.
We cannot act otherwise. Indeed, our ability to discern the difference between dream and reality is one of the ways our sanity is determined.
But look at reality. Is it truly more "real" than a dream? Doesn't much of what happens in the world seem unbelievable?
Of course, if we actually went about our days thinking we were in a dream we might be removed from society - perhaps institutionalized.
Anesthesia and other drugs place patients in the strangest kinds of states. Even a dose of nitrous oxide in the dentist's office can send us to another world - or certainly to a different consciousness. Mental illness can further redefine our reality in ways that cry out for compassion from caregivers.
Life "hurts" enough so that we seem to spend much of our waking lives trying to anesthetize ourselves from reality one way or another. The bored nurse, the worn-out board member, the exhausted doctor, the burned out caregiver facing the same intractable patient every day - each one wishes reality were different.
Our dream state can be a refuge or a nightmare. In other words, just like life.
But, dreams can also inform our existence in remarkable and enriching ways. The problem is that most of us discount our dreams so quickly the dream never has a chance to tell us anything.
A dear friend lost her brother in an accident at sea. She and her mother fretted over the death for a year. One night, our friend dreamed that she was flying. She looked over and there was her brother flying next to her. Then she saw her mother further off in the distance.
Her brother told her he was fine and that she needed to let him go.
The next morning, she quickly called her mother. "You'll never believe what I dreamed, mom. Her mother cut her off. "Wait, you will never believed what I dreamed. I was flying and you were too and your brother flew next to us and told us not to worry."
Dreams can tell us so much. Perhaps, we should listen.
-Erie Chapman
And there is this: "
| "All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible." |
| -- T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) |
Photograph: Alex Dreaming - copyright erie chapman 2012
