Dreams have fascinated humans for as long as humanity has been capable of thinking and communicating. Take the earliest cultural milestones of different civilizations, such as The Iliad or the epic of Gilgamesh, and you are bound to find dreams there. Ancients perceived them as signs from Gods, materialists dismissed them as fancies of imagination, psychoanalysis rationalized them as manifestations of suppressed urges – and the reams themselves remained as mysterious as ever. Indeed, they are one of these things that most have, yet few would attempt to describe in any detail. The dream experience, so intense and tangible while you are in it, evaporates with the waking call faster than one can capture its essence with words.
Perhaps this elusiveness is what ultimately makes dreams what they are – the sheer impossibility of freezing them in time and place, even if in one’s mind only. Perhaps, you have once even had a particularly fascinating dream abruptly ended by waking up and rushed to describe it on paper while it was still fresh in your memory. Yet when your morning self gazes at the hurried scribbles that were meant to signify some breathtaking ideas, it is hard to understand what could have engrossed you so in this stream of unrelated images and thoughts.
I vividly remember a dream where I tried to save time – literally, to amass and store time – by gathering sewing needles into a coconut shell. It made perfect sense to me while I dreamt – if anything, I wondered how others, in their infinite folly, have failed to understand it before me. Hence, and, when a sudden noise outside woke me up, I hurried to capture this thrilling epiphany in writing to bask in its glory in the morning. You can guess the rest – once I re-read my nightly notes afterward, I could barely comprehend why I even found it worth writing about.
For me, that is the thing about dreams – they define the rules of thought and action as we are used to perceiving them. They laugh at any attempt to capture their essence, which makes writing a descriptive essay about them an ironic task to begin with. They are something that only exists in a microcosm of a sleeping mind and can never be recreated. And, in this respect, dreams are an exercise in life – a lesson about living in the moment, here and now, because it will never repeat.