I'm a heavy sleeper, and I have a very intense dream activity.
These are two conditions that rarely align well with memory and are the prelude to forgetting dreams.
Why do we forget our dreams?
Some experts say that the tangled and strange nature of dreams makes it hard for our waking, rational brain to untangle them.
Others point to our memory relays. These supposedly shut down when we fall asleep, and when we wake up, we're left with a blank slate about what happened while we were asleep.
Whatever the true reason for their easy forgetfulness, something from our dreams always remains.
An image, a taste, just a scent or a nauseating smell that haunts us all day. Maybe an inexplicable bad mood that we'll unload with full force on some poor, unsuspecting person around us, or a sudden happiness that we'll attribute to a waking event that would have stressed us out in another situation. Or perhaps a stomach discomfort that we'll intellectualize and turn into a neighborly argument, or the button that will trigger the next nuclear conflict.
It's this unknown that unsettles me, this powerless fragment of myself coming from a nonexistent place where I lived a life while asleep. Like a shard of an asteroid from deep space, from where even light is afraid to escape.
My dreams are mine, my dream world is my exclusive property, but I have no control over how either of them manifests. I can only suffer their useless and often harmful influences. A mere paying spectator of my own daytime motives.
Dreams are useless fragments of a parallel, utterly dark life. They're implanted in waking life and are solely destined to generate chaos, discord, misunderstandings, and mass melancholy.
How much of my daytime behavior is truly the result of a carefully planned process defined while awake?
Does what I'm writing at this moment really align with what I want and wish to convey? Or is it just the verbal form of what I dreamed last night? Perhaps these words are merely the linguistic form that dreams adopt to sneak into my waking life and make me act, manipulating me with strings whose ends disappear into infinity.
It's no wonder that dreams have always been so alluring to humans. So frightening and incomprehensible. Lacking a beginning and an end. Capable of captivating us with their beauty, yet also leaving us in total indifference, terrifying us with toys, and making us laugh at ruins. Able to stop our hearts and hold us in death until we wake.
I wouldn't be surprised if the disillusionment with free will found solace in the depths of dreams.
Nor would I be shocked if the origin of God lay hidden in this dark mystery of memory.
It's a core that can surely generate beautiful and creative things, no doubt. But their occurrence remains confined to the realm of chance, or at least to what we perceive as random.
Our inability to control dream activity and guide its developments deprives us of authorship over the work. We're denied the possibility of mastering its creative origin and systematically enjoy it during waking life.
By default, we're denied reverse engineering.
Yet we experience both the well-being and discomfort it causes us, as if we were taking a drug whose effects are neither predictable nor controllable. It might make us feel good, but it could also leave us terribly drained for the entire day.
But drugs have a clear advantage over dreams: we can choose not to take them.
With dreams, we don't even have that option. When they come, we dream, and that's it - and often, we don't even know if they came. We just endure their subtle consequences as they seep into our mood and the atmosphere we create around us.
Where does the dream hide?
When we admit that something almost unknown and beyond our control governs our daytime behaviors, we must necessarily accept that its influence on our intentionality could be complete, potentially eliminating free will entirely.
I read a fascinating 2012 neuroscience study related to this.
You can find the full text of the study here.
In short, the researchers recorded neuronal activity in the frontal cortex of 12 volunteers who performed simple finger movements.
Remarkably, the neurons under observation began to activate 1500 ms. before the subjects reported making the decision to move their fingers.
The neural pre-activation was so strong that it could even be used as a predictive factor for the movements the subjects would later make.
Do you see where I’m going with this?
We’re talking about an incredibly short time, 1500 ms., really less than a blink, but during this endlessly long time in which the neural network was active and ready for action, where were the subjects? Something inside them acted without their knowledge, guiding them toward actions they would later recognize as dictated by their own will.
Something in their brain acted preconsciously before their impulse to move.
Perhaps the arrow of time in our brain travels in reverse? Or do centuries of reflections on free will sink into those 1500 ms.?
Even the researchers, in their article, admit that the neural coding of movements in the human brain remains a dense mystery.
The dream exists in that asymptotic space, where it approaches reality with dizzying speed, but never touches it, never overlaps with it. In the space where time travels in all directions. Where the actions we’ll perform while awake are built, along with their true motivations, which we’ll presumptuously mistake as our own.
The more research advances, the more the mystery becomes heavy and overwhelming.
Believing we make choices based on careful, conscious reasoning is increasingly being revealed as an embarrassing presumption.
We are lived. Our puppeteer can only be the dream.
I want to get rid of the impact my dreams have on my daytime life
How can I become the sole architect of my choices?
I should eradicate dreaming from my life. Purge my sleep of all images and dramatizations. Make it a tabula rasa, smooth as a pulsar, a heartless organism, a zombie.
I crave a dreamless life, a deep sleep as black as Edgar Allan Poe’s Maelstrom.
I no longer want to dream, but my very being refuses to obey.
Perhaps, a life without dreams isn’t really living.
Life is dream. Outside of this equation, organic matter returns to the inorganic.
The dream is an infinite forest that burns forever on primitive soil. We only catch the acrid smell of the burning, while the fertile and inexhaustible part remains on the ground. The humus that continues to produce our gestures and memories through spontaneous germination.
I have no other choice but to continue to dream.
I will ask whoever sleeps next to me to wake me up as soon as I show signs of dream activity.
The only way I can exert any control, however slight, over my dreams.