For the purposes of this reflection, I shall exercise recounting a personal dream.
I was being carried at desert, inside what could be described as approximating a cement mixer. The chamber walls were as if made of petrified sand — beige in hue like the shell of a snail. The chamber itself did not move, though the sand in it was turbulent. I, the self, was aware of the image of my body as if capable of third person view. A ragged premature boy of bald head, with no resemblance to my waking features, was the “I” to whom “I” also whispered to, and watched, and loved from an immaterial domain. He, or I, was in that chamber also, nested in the turbulent sand which swirled around me as if stirred coffee in a mug. It was understood, a priori (as the dream protagonist often has implicit understandings of the dream life, which seamlessly shifts with no question), that I was being carried at desert, and was part of a long trail of travelers. Although, it does not emerge in my recall that I knew the travelers to be embodied and material life — but units of ghostly presence. Suddenly, water poured in the chamber, though I had also expected it, as if I willed this surprise onto myself…
This initial act of articulating the dream content into words ought to be explored.
The articulation of dreams often requires finding the words to objects that which do not exist but in the dream. The object therefore cannot be represented with a single object word, like “chair”, “desk” or “floor”. To be precise, each differentiable unit “thing” perceived then must be individually accounted for to make a complete linguistic remark of the things in the dream, for that is what the nocturnal reality is often constituent of.
The cognitive “function” that a dream may serve can be said to be one of practice in linguistic literacy in post-hoc interpretations. The act of producing a precise text that compromises no semantics and is comprehensive of the dream material is the initial cognitively demanding task of dream analysis (or analysis of dreams as such). Each unit dream object is constituent of multiple domains of perception/experiential being — and often completely lacking in certain information that produces the otherwise coherent “waking/real” object.
Although lacking in information, the dream scene is still saturated with information, not just of the “object”, but the domain of that intense affect. The affect is “mystical” and “unearthly”, to avoid the word “transcendent”. In this analysis, I avoid premature claims to other-worldly Scooby Dooby spookiness. However, it must be admitted that the dream experience, in whatever flavor, is of a “sacred” quality. Any attempt to describe each individual affect (if they can be so differentiated) or to utter that which is the common characteristic of dream emotions fail to be exact, and therefore is in error.
Prior to any claims of cognitive benefit, the contemporarily ridiculed dream interpretation is a “functional” byproduct of the emergence of dreams. This peculiar act of sharing dreams and making interpretations have a substantial seat in history. We dream, and that often produces solitary or group mediated interpretive conclusions, though often of practical inconsequence in contemporary living.
