Experiencing dream remnants

If you wake up in the morning and get out of bed at the usual time, but then get back into bed in the afternoon to take a nap half-way through the day, scraps from the residues of the previous night’s dream return to your waking mind. It’s just shards and threads of the whole of that imaginary conflict, those scenes that came in the hours or minutes before you woke, in that state of sleep that is most conducive to dreaming.

Images and feelings from the night before flit across your consciousness as they are triggered in memory and evoked back into mind through the stimulation deriving from the familiar feel of the pillow against the side of your head, your cheek, and by the equally-familiar odour of the sheets in your nostrils. You are no longer standing or sitting upright as you normally are during your waking hours. Your now-horizontal body fits neatly into the familiar mass of the mattress.

Curled up in your regular position, shaped something like a mogul skier, your thighs pressed together companionably, your feet lined up in tandem (the arch of the bottom foot touching the top of the foot above) – and with your hand nestled between your pillow and the sheet – you become aware of your slow breathing and of that other interior rhythm: your eternal heartbeat. Relaxed and recumbent you experience a familiar feeling of contentment.

A comfortable mass lies at the core of your stomach, pressing up against the barrier at the entrance to your oesophagus. You feel a fulness at the back of your throat. A sense of well-being seems to be on the verge of breaking out of your body like a cry. You might also feel a pang at the side of your abdomen near your stomach as something unexpected happens there, and a sensation replying to it at the tip of the thumb of your right hand where it lies upturned on the sheet. The perimeter of your stomach shifts each time you breathe as your diaphragm pushes out, displacing slightly the contents of your abdomen and making you aware of the sheet resting on top of you. It is summer, and the bedroom is warm.

You realise that this is your normal physical state. Married with the remnants of the previous night’s dream, the array of sensations you experience colour them with a hue different from when the dream was first real. You feel unutterably alive and the dream-fragments mingle with the feeling to make you light-headed as you lie awake in bed willing sleep to return despite the unpropitious hour. The blind is drawn over the window though sound enters from the city in the form of restrained mechanical moans, hums and knocks emanating from equipment operating on the building site up the street where they are putting up a block of flats.

But you might sense the effect of something else external like a tonic on your waking mind that contains deep significance yet that can hardly be captured in any vessel other than a dream, although of course it’s impossible to fairly resume a dream once it has been shattered by dawn. There’s no mechanism in existence that can knit together the broken extremities of dreams that lie on either side of the waking interval. You cannot make a longer dream out of such loose ends and fragmented beginnings as remain after sleep is over, not even when you lie down for your customary daytime nap. Not that you remembered the dream to a degree that made you want to revisit it. It just came back to you now.

And you wouldn’t want to live inside a dream anyway, they are too burdened with fear and loathing. Strange adversaries coexist alongside unimaginably-difficult tasks, and stubborn things that had been consigned to history come back to haunt you with a vengeance, like maths exams completed in real life long-ago and never regretted for their passing. But these imaginary visitations are yet replete with meaning, which is something our day-to-day lives always seem to lack. Because experiencing the remnants of dreams during the daytime reminds us of such losses it is a gift.

Dreaming about kite kayaks

This - if you can believe it - is a kite kayak. I had a dream last night about a kite kayak, a thing I had never heard of before looking it up online today. In the dream two of these contraptions approached where I was standing on a grassy shore. The first one was crewed by an elderly lady and the second one, which came a short distance after the first, was crewed by her daughter. The elderly lady wanted me to help her. I got her kayak to the shore and then things got a bit complex for I don't remember what happened next.

Later, I was standing on a Laser - which was the type of boat I sailed in real life for many years as a teenager - and it was propped up on a concrete foreshore. I had the idea that the craft would fare better if it was tethered to the foreshore, rather than propped up on it. I walked up the Laser's deck as it got steeper and steeper until I couldn't walk any more. Then I was standing on the foreshore looking down on the craft as it sat bobbing gently in the water. The boat was now tethered to the foreshore by a rope.

At times like these in dreams you might wake up to the call of nature, or because your mobile phone is ringing. I didn't wake up but these dreams in my memory just seemed to fade out into ragged ends that find no easy conclusion, so that's all I'll be able to convey for the moment.

I don't know why I dreamt about kite kayaks. When I lived on the Coast I often saw kite surfers in the ocean along the long beaches they have up there. The beaches face east. The kite surfer shop was down in Cotton Tree near the fish-and-chip shop and the laundry. I would walk down to get lunch there on occasion. In fact I loved to eat their flathead; crispy, thin strips of fish deep fried in bread crumbs. Their chips were also good. A fish-and-chip lunch for me was something of a treat. On other days I would eat a prepared roll or sandwich from the deli cafe, or a tub of salad. I never saw any kite kayaks on the Coast.

When I was a teenager I found a kayak in a council-cleanup bin and brought it home. It was made of wood with canvas stretched over the frame. Initially I took the kayak out with the paddle from my father's Hobie Cat. It was a one-ended paddle. Eventually I made myself a proper kayak paddle out of wood, and varnished it. I took that kayak all around the harbour, into lonely coves and around deserted foreshores. It's a wonder I survived with the thing. I kept it standing upright when not in use propped against a pine tree in the bottom garden, which gave onto the beach.

The astonishing power of dreams

Astonishing the power of dreams, their narrative logic and coherence, and their vivid display rifling our memories as we winnow the air with our breath asleep in our warm beds. Our fears and our desires are illustrated and thrown in our teeth as we rest our bodies in preparation for a new day, as we 'recreate' our waking vitality. While this is going on we are more than entertained, we are challenged, our motives are questioned, and we experience things that we would never talk about during our waking hours. It is more like a trial than a diversion, more like a test than a mere recreation, more like a distilled and concertinaed struggle the individual elements of which might in real life play themselves out over weeks and months. Or years. Or never.

This is a piece of text I wrote after a dream some weeks back, and which was so strange and alive that I felt compelled to write it down. I have had kissing dreams before, but never this one. When I was young I used to have the same dream over and over again; in it there was a girl in our garden standing there. But this dream was far more precise and rich in detail.

And then after we had compared performances in philosophy essays – he said there had been 10 but I could only remember 3, and the essay I had on my lap, having been returned from the lecturer’s desk, was filled with red notations and had been given an OA minus – and after he had changed direction and driven me home to meet his family, and after we had parked his car in the garage on the steep slope overlooking the populated ravine, and after he had introduced my cat to his brother and sister and parents, and after he had brought me into his bedroom and asked me again about the riddle I had devised for a video game, and after moving close to me so that I could see clearly where his hair came away from his forehead, he tilted his head toward me. I looked down at his mouth situated right there only a swerve away from my own and noticed that it was completely saturated as though from a kiss or from rain – but only the mouth, the rest of his face was quite dry! – but I knew that we had not yet kissed. His mouth appeared to be firm and sculpted like that of an Italian statue and with my mouth I enfolded the entirety of his lips in mine and immediately woke up.

I wonder if I will ever have this dream again. Will I ever find out what happens after I kiss the young man? Will this dream become a leitmotiv of my life in my present age, and will it accompany me in life like the dream of the girl in the garden of my parents' house next to the park, with the flower beds and the stands of hydrangeas, the sloping lawn and the gate in the stone wall leading into the wilderness with its immense sandstone rocks, its paths, its stream, and its gum trees and caves? 

I seek to give my dreams a second run

In my dream there were no doors to knock on because every house had a secret method of gaining access. So I was escorted everywhere. After crossing a railway bridge on the rotten boards I feared I would not keep up with my hosts and, as they disappeared into the distance, I realised I would end up alone, with nowhere to go, and no way to communicate with anyone. Even the serpent that had bit me benignly in greeting, and which looked like a big, green cat, had disappeared. I was a dependent but I had my own agenda, so I was an anomaly without any solution except to wake up.

It would be easy to interpret this dream as a metaphor for death, a very elaborate and intricate one, to be sure, but the transition could be made without stretching the boundaries of understanding too far. This kind of interpretation is the stuff of ancient texts, texts rescued from the ravages of time by scribes or archaeologists. It is because in us there is a built-in need to find meaning, and if religion is the answer to questions posed by dead generations, then reasoned critique of religion now arises from the same font.

If I don't understand the religious impulse it might of course be because I haven't examined myself adequately. What do I rely on in times of trouble, and what inspires me? I am more equable in the face of the questions that come out of my own reason - which discerns patterns among the random phenomena of existence - and which has served me so well for so long. So in a sense I am being more honest, and more adventurous than the religious individual for instead of relying on the wisdom of the ancients I am creating my identity anew each day that I wake from my dreams.

But yet I ask: what was the green cat that mumbled softly on my arm, and whose back I stroked so affectionately? We may stand aside from ruminations like this and assert that dreams are the mind's way of cleansing itself, as well as the body's way of telling us how healthy - or otherwise - it is. Even if we do, however, there will always be moments when we regret that our waking mind cannot see as clearly as our dreaming consciousness. We are all dreamers at heart.

What dreams are made of: Memories, anxieties and aspirations

I chose one of Francisco Goya's etchings for this post because the series it belongs to, The Disasters of War, which was a series that the artist made between 1810 and 1820, and which he did not publish, has inspired so much praise over the years; many will remember Australian writer Robert Hughes' book on Goya, for example. Goya also made an allegory, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, in 1797, some 10 years before the Peninsula War, which inspired the later series, began. It's possible that what Goya referred to in this clumsy allegory - a man, slumped asleep at a table, has a flock of bats and owls hovering over him; it's pure classical kitsch - was the carnage that occurred in France and Europe as a result of the French Revolution's spiraling out of control and turning into both a domestic bloodbath and a series of wars in foreign countries led by Napoleon Bonaparte, that brought devastation and misery to the people of Europe. Goya's allegory looks at the downside of radical changes in the polis. But it's worthwhile remembering that in England in the same year of 1797 Coleridge and Wordsworth published their seminal poetry collection, Lyrical Ballads - many people in England at the time said the book was monstrous - which looks at the upside of the realignment of the political settlement, a change that would serve to reform corrupt and superannuated regimes throughout Europe and lead to the establishment of a preferable model in those countries, in democracy.

Dreams are full of anxieties and aspirations, and they are often based on memories. At least mine are. Like one in which I am applying for a job with an employer who had refused to employ me decades earlier. Or that dream I sometimes have that contains images and anxieties rooted in my high school matriculation examination. Sometimes a recurring dream will contain an image so piercing - like the one where I kiss a girl in a garden, and the kiss suffuses me with the most pure and unadulterated joy - that it even becomes a memory, as though it had really happened.

Last night I had another of those anxiety-filled employer dreams. I was aiming to reapply for a position as a diplomat - just after graduating with my undergrad degree, in 1985, I actually did attend the first level of interviews for the diplomatic service, and was turned down - and it turned out that there was someone working in IT with the department who I'd worked with previously in another job. In the dream, I see him walking towards me, going in the direction of a staircase, and I call out his name, hoping that he can inform my prospective employer that we had worked together before, but he either doesn't hear me or else he ignores me. In any case he walks past me, climbs the stairs, and disappears. Frustrations like this come to me often in dreams about places I have worked at in the real past. And for some reason I keep wanting to go back and work again with the same employers whose employ I had quit at different times. In another dream, there was a technology company where I had worked, and there was an executive I knew. For some reason there were huge photocopying machines and he was standing behind one of these monstrosities smiling and talking to me, but I did not get the job again.

And while some dreams - like my kissing the girl in the garden - are so strong that they become memories, at other times there are real memories that appear to be like dreams, like the time I fell in love with a man at a party in Bondi. At the time I was living in the inner-Sydney suburb of Newtown in a share-house. As happens when you are young and vigorous you give little thought to how you'll get home from these suburban bashes, and in this case I do not remember how this happened at all. But I do remember arriving home to find a flatmate and his girlfriend - who did not live in the house - sitting in the kitchen at the kitchen table. I sat down and we talked for hours and laughed; I was so happy. But I never contacted that man again, and the memory of the encounter is therefore like a dream.

Possibly women dream of leaning against the chest of a man, talking through the hours and feeling the vibrations of his utterances thrum through his chest and into yours. Like I did, they can feel the strength and the warmth, feel the laughter vibrate in their own bodies. Did I really stand with him, talking, as the stars edged their way through the darkness and the waves rolled incessantly over the shallows to break on the beach? Did we talk about school friends - though he went to a different school, we knew some of the same people - and what they had done? Did we kiss passionately and did I feel the rough stubble of his cheeks against my skin? I could swear that these things really happened. I could, if I wanted, get in touch tomorrow with my old flatmate and ask him, "Do you remember that night in Alice Street when I came home late and we stayed up talking for hours, and laughed so much?".