What's in a Dream?
Exploring the meaning of dreams and whether we should integrate dreams in story.
I dream. A lot. Mostly of expanding houses. In this dream, my house is my house but it’s also not mine. In other words, in my dream, I know it’s mine, even if it looks nothing like the real one and doesn’t make sense in context. I’m in New Orleans, for example, the house on Claibourne Ave where I drove almost every day in college. This house is made of dark wood, like a cabin, and shaded, perhaps in the forest (there is neither forest nor cabins, i.e., termite fodder, in New Orleans proper, by the way), Spanish moss hanging in front of its doors. Or, I’m in my actual current house, but when I go into the basement, there’s a football-field sized space down there, with doors leading to unexplored rooms with doors to other rooms.
I mentioned this dream to two friends the other day and they didn’t recognize it. They’d never had the expanding-house dream, but they had had the naked-at-school dream or the married-to-someone-from-childhood dream. They were dreamers, just not of this particular one.
When my husband, mere days later, mentioned he’d had the expanding-house dream, I posed the question to writing Twitter. Many of them, not surprisingly, had had the dream often. Maybe it was a writerly thing, I thought. I knew the dream was ‘supposed’ to mean an expanding consciousness, or redefining self. It’s creative, philosophical, and exploratory. So it made sense writers would be prone to this specific dream. But, I thought, aren’t we all, as humans, introspective in nature? Why isn’t everyone having this dream?
Maybe, I concluded, they did the introspective work in their waking hours. Maybe the dream didn’t mean anything, at all.
What’s in a dream?
Writers have an unwritten rule not to include dreams in stories, though I often do. Just the other day, a woman in my writing group commented that I couldn’t (that was the word she used, can’t) start my novel with my protagonist mentioning a dream she’d had. I knew the rule, and I thought, yeah, okay. But, then again, why not? (I hate such rules, by the way, and I love to dare to break them.) Often, such ‘writing rules’ are born from too many inexperienced writers using certain tropes or devices as tricks, shortcuts, or cheats—ways to deliver information all at once, for example, or in place of actual character development and scene, or in lieu of developing a good twist (as in the ‘it was all just a dream’ plot).
But I think dreams can become valid in story when short and used to reveal the character’s stressors and current obsessions. Having and remembering dreams, at all, show, for example, that the character is introspective, likely anxious, creative, and always thinking. Dreams are such a huge part of my existence that to omit them from my stories might feel like leaving out a third of my mind. I wake thinking about whatever dream was just interrupted and often ponder the images again during the day. I create stories based on my dreams. Dreams inform me of my current concerns and how I might be thinking of these problems. They guide me as much as my waking life inspires them.
For centuries, philosophers have debated the meaning of dreams. Many are skeptical. Some assign them great importance. Descartes, for example, suggested that dreams can be so realistic that there is no way to know whether we are in one (maybe even all the time) or in reality. He used dreams to argue that reality is subjective, since dreams, which are experienced only by the dreamer, can also influence our memory and perceptions of the waking world. (“I think, therefore I am” essentially means that you can only know thyself; the outside world is up for debate.)
And, of course, Freud famously (or infamously) argued that dreams inform us of people’s latent desires. He analyzed patient dreams during sessions to reveal their hidden most thoughts. Freud may have been a mysoginist who was overly obsessed with sex, but he got one thing right: many of our dreams reveal a problem our subconscious might be trying to work out, store as new information, or shape our personalities.
In college, in a philosophy class on the subconscious, my professor tasked us with controlling our dreams. We were to think of something before going to bed, then try to dream about it when asleep. Once dreaming, we were to wake ourselves up or make a deliberate choice within the dream—go there instead of there, for example. After trying this exercise only twice, I found I could control my dreams while in them, waking myself up if they became disturbing, or telling my sleeping self ‘it’s only a dream, you’re in a dream.’ I found that, after two or three times of doing this during nightmares, I stopped having nightmares all together. I stopped fearing most things, even in waking life, not thinking twice about going into a dark room alone to turn on a light or in a basement to change out the laundry. Facing my fears in my dream state—telling myself that my fears were self-induced—had allowed me to grow past them in my waking life, and all of this growth happened over the course of one semester of college because I analyzed dreams. So much for meaningless, eh?
In a similar experience while studying at a writing conference years ago, my mentor and I discussed the nature of the subconscious. I told him about a reoccurring dream I’d had since childhood, about my closet opening and a long, bony finger extending from the darkness and beckoning me inside. As a child, I was naturally afraid of this nightmare. As an adult, I became perplexed by it. Why was I still having this dream? What did it mean? “The closet is your subconscious,” my mentor told me in an earnest tone. “Next time, go in.” I did. I haven’t had the dream since. Maybe I had simply been curious about what was in there. Maybe I had only needed permission to peek inside.
So, are dreams our own way of daring self to take risks safely? Kind of an unconscious tragedy? Aristotle said that watching dramatic tragedies can do the same for us by eliciting our fear and pity in others’ tragic events. In other words, watching tragedy is a vicarious way of living out our own fears. By watching and pitying other people—kings falling from grace because of their unwise decisions—we do not have to learn the lessons of great failure by experiencing them in our own lives.
What if story is just another version of what our dreams do while we sleep, playing with ideas in safe but dramatic manners we cannot in real-life live out? And, if that is true, why can’t we write about dreams?
Why ignore so much of what our brains want to discover?
Maybe this is a problem I need to dream about tonight. Maybe I’ll tell my unconcsious self to get on that.
Do you dream? Do you sometimes wake from a dream unsure whether it really happened? Have you had the expanding-house dream, and if so, are you a creative type? I’d love to hear your experiences!
Wow, I have never even *heard* of the expanding house dream, and it makes me feel a little left out, like everybody has read a certain classic novel but me! Fascinating ideas here--thank you for sharing 💜
I love this post. Yes, I've had the expanding house dream! My house often has a sideways-moving elevator, it's so big! My dreams are part of my life as well; they help me overcome fears and anxieties, analyze issues I'm going through in waking life, and sometimes even give me emotional information about others that I don't pick up on in my waking life.