Image via WikipediaOver the past week my dream life has been very active with long bouts of dreaming but little memory of the specifics of the dreams. This lack of memory is not because I didn't have any capability of remembering, but rather due to the fact that upon awakening I immediately went about various activities without dwelling upon my dreams. In other words, I'm quite sure that I could have recollected the dream details, but I chose not to.
I did track the dream content over the course of the dream sleep time because I awoke almost hourly--as I am prone to do at this stage of my life--and checked to see what time it was. Each time I woke up I was aware of the general story line of the dream and at the end of dream sleep time I was aware that the story had been a continuation of the previous dream sleep period.
During one sleep cycle I was dreaming in great length and detail about contemporary Christian music artists and business. There seemed to be a great deal of content that related to the church I attend, various Christian artists, and the business side of contemporary Christian music.
On another night--or perhaps I should more accurately say morning since this is when most remembered dreams occur--I was dreaming in continued ongoing segments about blogging and things related to that activity. These dreams continued over a period of several hours. Nothing in particular seemed to be happening in the dream as far as action or story, but their seemed to be purposeful intent in the ongoing dreams.
I can directly relate the influence of each of these dream sequences. The blogging dream is obvious since I spend so much time blogging or thinking about blogging. The Christian music dream I can connect to my waking activity of researching and writing about the topic of contemporary Christian music on the preceding day.
One might come to the obvious conclusion that my dreams were merely recreating a dream story based on the previous day's experiences. My mind was compartmentalizing data from my day and evaluating it before it was stored into the inner recesses of my memory.
Then again, my dreaming mind might have been using familiar ideas to symbolically tell another story entirely unrelated to the actual activities of the previous day. It could be that my dream was reinterpreting my preceding day to process it into something of greater relevance to the bigger picture of my life circumstance.
Is a dream about blogging really about blogging or is it actually related to something entirely different and on a much broader scale? If I am doing research about a topic like Christian music and writing about that topic and then later have a dream about that same topic, is the dream in reality about that topic or is it something else.
My fault of not taking the time to evaluate the dream, write it down, and remember its details, has caused me to forget the relevance of the dream--or dreams. Many dreams are lost in this same way. Does it matter? Should we be listening more carefully to our dreams and trying to understand them better?
That might make me be inclined to ask: What comes first? The dream or the action? Is the dream an interpretation of things past or does the dream prognosticate things to come by teasing us with symbolism? What is the truest state of things? The dream? Or that time in which we think we are awake?
As one finds in the header blog description of one of my favorite bloggers:
“We have fallen asleep in God's embrace, having a nightmare that we are elsewhere."
Maybe this says it all.
