I have been told, by a sleep professional no less, that I am a “vivid dreamer”. I remember my dreams often, the twilight theatrics of my unconscious seared into memory by their intensity. Sometimes my dreams upset me, rehashing painful memories and serving them up with an extra side of terror. But mostly they’re just a bit odd, and leave me wondering what I’ve witnessed in the still of the night.
Perhaps that’s why interpreting dreams is one of my favourite activities. You can tell a lot about a person by how they do it. Do they subscribe to the superstitious (“A message from the other side!”), the psychological (“This speaks to a wider sense of insecurity”) or the physical (“The human body is not designed to eat whole wheels of cheese”)? Sometimes, the reading of the dream can be more telling than the vision itself: such as the time I told Auntie B that I had had a dream about an owl with guillotine talons. “It’s a message. I knew it would come,” she said, straight-faced. “God is telling you to lose some weight.” This was an interpretation that told me nothing about the dream and everything about why I don’t call Auntie B.
It’s funny, but back when I was a teenager, I despised my dreams. I felt attacked by them, persecuted, and insisted on seeing a doctor. I explained to him that although I hadn’t really lived through, say, a castle siege starring Nicolas Cage (as himself, and occasionally as Pingu), I had lived through something. I must have; I was tired when I woke up, and throughout the day would be distracted by flickers of the previous night’s dream, with three-second gifs rattling around my brain. I was convinced my dreams would make me lose my mind.
But now I think the opposite is happening. I’m sure that my dreams are, in their own way, helping me. They are giving me a space to play out my fears and anxieties. They’re also entertaining. When I recently discovered that the over-60s often dream in black-and-white, I started to do the same, mashing up classic Hollywood films with 2008 urban London and waking up with visions of Clark Gable in Sports Direct.
Whenever I ask people about how I will know when I have hit adulthood, someone will say that a key sign is acceptance of yourself, in all your idiosyncrasies. I still have some way to go with that, but after many years I can finally say, I’m blessed to bear witness to my night-time escapades.
