We’re dreaming today with collector Robert E Jackson. Triggered by the undertow of memory and fed by desire, our dreams are visions of other lives, possible clues to the future. “The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind,” wrote Sigmund Freud in his The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900. It’s where things can fall into place, like iron filing being ordered by a magnet, the isolated moments of our awake selves are given shape.
Never idle, we can accomplish in our dreams. The Serbian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev (February 8, 1834–February 2, 1907) created the periodic table in a writing in his diary:
I saw in a dream a table where all the elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper.
So how did you sleep last night? Or are you asleep now? Philosophy professor Jan Westerhoff writes in Reality” A Very Short Intoduction: “…there is a significant chance of you dreaming right now.” That chance he reasons is around one in ten…
Last night, I had the strangest dream
I sailed away to China
In a little rowboat to find ya
And you said you had to get your laundry clean
Didn’t want no one to hold you, what does that mean?– Break My Stride by Matthew Wilder
Sweet dreams are made of this
Who am I to disagree?
I travel the world and the seven seas
Everybody’s looking for something– Eurythmics, Sweet Dreams
Please, don’t wake me
No, don’t shake me
Leave me where I am
I’m only sleeping– The Beatles, I’m Only Sleeping
Our waking existence likewise is a land which, at certain hidden points, leads down into the underworld — a land full of inconspicuous places from which dreams arise. All day long, suspecting nothing, we pass them by, but no sooner has sleep come than we are eagerly groping our way back to lose ourselves in the dark corridors. By day, the labyrinth of urban dwellings resembles consciousness; the arcades… issue unremarked onto the streets. At night, however, under the tenebrous mass of the houses, their denser darkness protrudes like a threat, and the nocturnal pedestrian hurries past — unless, that is, we have emboldened him to turn into the narrow lane.
– Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
I closed my eyes, drew back the curtain
To see for certain what I thought I knew
Far, far, away, someone was weeping
But the world was sleeping
Any dream will do– Joseph and His Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, Any Dream Will Do
“Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.”
— Edgar Allan Poe, Eleonora
“The dead still live: for they appear to the living in dreams.” So reasoned mankind at one time, and through many thousands of years.
– Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits
I was dreamin’ when I wrote this
Forgive me if it goes astray
But when I woke up this mornin’
Could’ve sworn it was judgment day– Prince, 1999
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