We are the heroes of our own dreams

A recent article at Psychology Today suggests that dreams may serve the function of training us for how to deal with threats. Citing the vast number of nightmarish and negative dreams over fantasies and problem solving, researchers believe that dreams may be a practice-place for understanding how to respond to real-world difficulties, even to the point of suggesting that all those nightmares of zombies and aliens are really misappropriated imagery that fills the old evolutionary role of running from the saber-tooth tigers.

Robert Stickgold however, holds that dreaming is much more complex than rehearsal. He points, for example, to the ability of sleep to allow us to integrate and consolidate knowledge, or to come up with novel and artistic solutions. During sleep, our brains are making sense of the world, discovering new associations among existing memories, looking for patterns, formulating rules. "That's how we create meaning," says Stickgold. "Our brain puts things together."

Personally I agree that dreams can help us deal with threats, and help integrate our knowledge about the world, but even still there is some element of the fantastic, the joking and playful, the absurd, that dreams can always present to us, even in our most "realistic" dreams, that suggests to me something above and beyond a mere flight response. Perhaps dreams allow us not only to integrate our knowledge of the world, but articulate a deeper sense of personal relationship to this world, and everything that may or may not happen in it.



Last night I watched Paprika for the third time, which, in the opinion of someone who admittedly has been paying attention to the depiction of dreams in media since about third grade when I discovered Little Nemo in Slumberland, is a rather stunning depiction of the sheer insanity, intricate symbolism, and metaphysical speculation that I have always associated with dreaming. In the chaotic parade of all things under the sun, the use of Jungian archetypes fighting against Freudian repressions, imagistic leitmotifs that accompany each character, or the final idea that perhaps all our dreams are connected, this movie, based off the book by Yasutaka Tsutsui (that was apparently based off the authors own dreams and I desperately wish was in an English translation), certainly does not depict dreams as being a mere "threat-evasion" or problem solving technique, but a true reveling ground of the psyche and all that is possible in the human imagination.