of snakes knotted together in a laundry basket; sheets of yellow paper blowing down a hillside. But I could recall no contexts, no stories, no sense of where I was or if I was there at all, nothing that I could reasonably think of as a proper dream, such as the one I had stolen from K. I knew, though, that I had dreamed many such dreams. It was simply that I had forgotten them. It made me wonder whether there was something about dreams which did not allow them to be easily remembered. Did they contain some sort of self-destruct mechanism? It was hard to remember them when you first woke up; harder still, as K had demonstrated, just a few days later; almost impossible, as I now found, after any length of time more than that. Perhaps there was a reason for it.
I remembered too how something inside me recoils from hearing someone else’s dream. My mind shies away from it in the same way that my body shies away from a height or a dog. Perhaps there was a reason for that too, and perhaps they were the same reason.
I moved through the water and the muffled, riotous noise, towards the surface and the moving light. My feet kicked.
There would be nothing at all to worry about if dreams were unimportant. But I don’t know that they’re unimportant. I mean, they may well be unimportant, and if they are then I’m being stupid, and if you believe they’re unimportant then this is going to make you very impatient. But the fact is – and I’ve done a little research – nobody really knows what dreams are. The scientists and the doctors and the psychiatrists have their various theories of course, but they are various, and no one really agrees about anything. So, imagine for a moment that dreams are important. Imagine that in some fundamental way they enable us to function. It’s not unreasonable, is it? Maybe dreams are the way our mind makes sense of itself. Maybe it’s in our dreams that we arrive at conclusions and make decisions which in our waking life take on the nature of givens, of truths, which we do not seek to explain. Maybe dreams are the way we develop our conscience, our morality, our personality. Maybe that’s how, and where, we allocate priorities and sort through aspects of ourselves and arrive at an understanding of how best to proceed. Maybe dreams make us wiser and better and more human. Maybe they make us ourselves.
And imagine as well that what we remember of dreams is just the smallest part of what has gone on while we slept. It is highlights, and it is remembered as images and sounds and emotions and sensations because that is the language that our waking mind uses, while in fact, in dreams, the language is very different – something strange and irreducible, inexpressible in words or signs. So, dreams tumble through us, and only small pieces of them are remembered, and then only in translation as it were, recalled in a way that allows them to be recalled.
When I realised that I had dreamed K’s dream, I realised too that this could not have been the first time that this had happened. It may have been the first time I had noticed it, but K has been recalling dreams over breakfast for years. And K is not of course the only person who tells me about their dreams. Rachel often does it, though I suspect she makes a lot of hers up, and another friend of mine, David, tells me regularly about his – complicated things that seemed to go on for ever. In the average week I will hear of strange images, unlikely circumstances, embarrassing situations, mysterious words and gestures and signs – all taken from the dreams of others. And all of this is fed into my subconscious and stays there somewhere, along with all the other things I hear and see in the course of my life. Inevitably, some of it will resurface in my own dreams. It goes into the mix. It is improbable to think that it wouldn’t. And I have the clear evidence of K’s dream to prove it.
When I first thought this through, it took a little while for me to work out the implications. But what nagged at me was the sensation I have whenever someone tells me their dream. I feel, as I’ve said, a definite reticence, almost distaste. As if I know innately that hearing the details of someone else’s dream is bad for me. And of course, I eventually realised, if dreams really are evidence of a nocturnal, deeply unconscious process by which we become ourselves, then taking the translated highlights of one person’s dreams and inserting them into the dreams of another might well be bad for all concerned. It might well be very damaging. For what are we processing then? Certainly nothing that is entirely our own. We’re working on the detritus of a different consciousness. Someone else’s stuff. We’re taking in orphan manifestations of another inner life. We’re dealing in interference, static, muddied waters, a polluted stream, a mess of mixed metaphors, a heap of confusion. There are false reports in the dispatches. In among your bad day at work, your difficult relationship with your mother, father, husband, wife, your financial problems and the threat of terrorism, is the bicycle ride along the cliff edge that your daughter dreamed of last Thursday; and the man with the sombrero who followed your work colleague around a cathedral in a dream she had last night and told you about this morning. How will these be processed? Will they be dismissed? Will they be confused with your own reality? Are they translations of very specific subconscious conclusions or switches or trips, which, when redreamed by you, will affect, alter or stall your own sleeping deliberations? Is that why we find it difficult to remember dreams? Because our minds are naturally wary of contagion? Is that why I feel so uncomfortable hearing someone else’s dream? Because I know it is infecting my own?
I voiced my theory to K. It would be wrong to say that the response was entirely dismissive. But my impression was that K was amused by it, thought it an entertaining conceit, a nicely ridiculous notion, and did not for a moment take it seriously.
—Dreams are not for sharing then?
—Well, no, they’re not. I don’t think so.
—Because they interfere with other dreams?
—Yes. I mean, I’m trying to think of an example. Imagine waking up in the middle of surgery and offering to help the surgeon.
—Yes?
—Well, it wouldn’t be good, would it?
—Why? Was I dreaming?
—No, surgery is the dreaming, is the process you go through while asleep, while dreaming, and then, in the middle of that, you interfere, or someone else interferes, in the process. It’s not a good example.
—No.
—OK, have you ever used one of those online translation services? You enter a web page in French or German or whatever and it gives you an instant rough translation?
—Yeah.
—OK, well, imagine that what you remember from a dream is like one of those translations. You know it’s not accurate, sometimes the inaccuracies are quite funny, but it’ll do, it gives you a rough idea.
—OK.
—Then imagine that you pass that translation on to someone else who then translates it again. Their translation will not only be an additional step away from the original, but it won’t even be their original that it’s one more step away from, it’s someone else’s.
—Why do they translate it again though?
—It’s an example.
—You need to work on your examples.
—But don’t you get it? Dreams are like your own personal, bear with me, your own personal essence.
—Oh dear.
—And telling other people about them risks, I don’t know. You exhale your essence and they inhale it and then their essence is compromised by your essence.
—Jesus.
—Well, it’s not an easy thing to get your head around.
—No.
