I don’t know why but somehow life does seem to have been more than averagely cramped as of late and that may have adversely affected this blog. So better late than never I’d like to write about a talk which I attended back in July – and not least because a friend was keen for me to do so.
I couldn’t possibly tell you the most disgusting dream that I have ever had since I would feel embarrassed writing it down even on this blog. Suffice to say that if I ever feel the need to create an artistic vision of Hell then I will almost certainly draw from it. The second queasiest dream that I ever had involved chocolate Easter eggs sprouting out of my body and the icky nature of that nightmare was unsettling enough to cause me to feel a tad nauseous for a day or two afterwards. Thinking of it even now is just slightly unsettling.
The subject of dreams came into my life earlier this year for a couple of reasons. In order to prepare for a review that I wrote of the acclaimed film Notes on Blindness, I re-read John Hull’s memoir Touching the Rock on which the film is based. I have slightly mixed feelings about John though a re-reading of his book has caused me to view him in a slightly more favourable light. However I was struck reading his memoir just how keen he is to interpret his dreams as relating to sight loss. Maybe that really was the case for him but a side of me agrees with Marty Crane from Frasier who in one episode tells his son, troubled by a homoerotic dream, ‘dreams are just weird!’. In other words, I don’t lose too much time analysing them.
Maybe though I should be grateful to The Wellcome Trust who do. In July a sighted friend and I went there for what I assumed would be an audio described tour but in fact was something far more interesting – a group discussion on blind people’s (mostly men it must be said) experiences of dreams. Well it has been said that if you want to teach algebra to Arthur, you need to know as much about Arthur as about algebra, and maybe the fact that only an hour was available meant that there was no time to understand where the participants were coming from ‘internally’. For example one participant who believed in God believed that dreams could be prophetic – a view not generally shared by the group. He appeared to believe that he had literally visited Hell in a dream.
So when it comes to what I personally dream, it seems at least vaguely relevant to say something about my waking imagination. Put simply I find it increasingly tiring to recall faces and find it a real struggle to photographically imagine what someone looks like. All too often when forced to do so my mind either creates a vague animation drawing or goes full-scale abstract. So when, in late 2013, I sat beside the bed of Fanta, my dying wife, I could obviously not see her and on occasions I imagined the form whose hand I was holding as being that of a little mouse. It is slightly distressing to me to know that the visual picture that I have in my mind of a particularly close friend of mine is almost certainly wrong and try as I might, I haven’t so far managed in my mind to replace it with a more accurate portrait.
Yet in spite of that, I still all too often dream ‘sighted’. Unlike John Hull I don’t think I ever in my life dreamt about my sight ‘coming back’ although I have on occasions dreamt about remembering that I can in fact still read standard print (uh uh! Not true!).
Maybe that is because I never envisaged my sight loss to be a drift away from ‘normality’. I hope it doesn’t sound self-pitying if I state that having experienced several years of bullying when at school and a sort of internal bullying through my OCD, I am in no illusion that it will take a damn sight more than restored vision to make me ‘normal’. Besides, when someone at a Quaker meeting recently asked me whether I had ever had normal eyesight, without a hint of anger or offence I asked him to define ‘normal’. Few ‘sighted’ people have full eyesight after all.
Well, that’s enough about me. What about the other participants? One of them stated how when he finally lost the last remnants of his sight, he looked forward to going to bed where he would be regaled by amazing, super-technicolour dreams of fully sighted adventures, some of them suitable for public consumption! Something similar is experienced by Gabrielle, the wheelchair using lead character in Liz Jensen’s novel The Rapture.
I can’t say I’ve experienced ‘naughty’ dreams of that sort although in the rather good film Black Sun, the narrator Hugues de Montalembert does state how his imagination went super-erotic after his sight went. Too often my dreams have revolved around me missing or narrowly avoiding missing an appointment or my getting lost or narrowly escaping death. I had assumed that was just my mind’s way of giving me a hard time and telling me that I’m going nowhere but in fact it was suggested in the discussion that there may be a more benign interpretation. Basically, it is the mind enabling the dreamer to prepare for future challenges, even if that entails them going wrong. My first thought was that I have a super Stoic brain but, no, the challenge in the dream might not be the one relevant to our external reality. In other words it’s to encourage fortitude. That would explain how two participants at the event had work anxiety related dreams concerning jobs that they had stopped doing long ago.
The other thing about my own dreams is that they are based as far as I can recall only on sight and hearing and not on other senses although I still recall a dream earlier this year in which I found myself above a busy road and fearing that if I put a foot wrong then I would plummet to my near-certain death. I couldn’t say with hindsight that no other senses kicked in during such a scenario – I just don’t remember them doing so. Yet another participant, born blind, said how in his dreams all senses except sight are involved, and I am reminded of a story that I heard years ago from a man born totally blind of how (as I recall) after a bad drug trip he imagined Braille letters physically closing in on him! I can’t say whether smell was included in that particular ‘bad trip’ but according to our hosts at Wellcome Trust, smell is the least noted of the senses when recalling dreams, even among sighted people. That’s not because the dreamers didn’t smell anything but because in a hyper-visual culture, we aren’t accustomed to pay so much attention to fragrances.
Returning to sight loss, one attendee said how in his dreams he is fully sighted but sometimes still carries a long cane. I can’t say I’ve done that but as stated earlier, I’ve had a fair few ‘partially sighted’ dreams.
So how can we as humans analyse dreams given how personal they are? The answer was not provided at the end of our session but it was made clear that it is not just humans but also animals who are subject to dreams. Scientists found out that fact through a regrettably rather cruel experiment. The parts of the brain responsible for paralysing them during REM were removed from a sample of cats and consequently they acted out their dreams – hunting, catching mice, running etc.
The evening ended with a discussion on sleep paralysis which I thankfully haven’t experienced but which my sighted friend who accompanied me had in fact experienced. I don’t envy her for that but I’m glad to her for accompanying me to this fascinating talk.
shaggy beast of thought 