I dream of JulieAnne

25/11/2014: 12 hours (and one tea) later...
IMAGE: tommykane

This is a dream I had about a person who is very special to me. Unlike so many of my other entires, I will not attempt to explain the meaning of this dream. It may speak for itself; in fact I actually hope that for the individuals reading it does indeed say something. It is not a particularly complex dream; in fact I would say that it is refreshingly simple as far as my dreams go. It touched me deeply and this is why I now take the time to write it up.

In my experience: some things in life are just too precious and delicate to survive intellectual deconstruction, and the interactions with the ones around us are probably a very good example of this. So whoever you are, I hope that you enjoy this entry simply for what it is, and what it has to say from your eyes.

The dream started rather abruptly, with myself sitting on a circular raft or wooden board, floating in the middle of the ocean. The water was warm; and it would gently rise and fall but overall was calm and pleasant. Thought I could not see the bottom; I intuited that the entire ocean was no more than waist deep. It stretched on endlessly; and the horizon was bordered at all sides by a range of beautiful mountains emerging out of the water itself. Sitting there in front of me, straddling another floating wooden circle, was the person mentioned in the title of this entry.

JulieAnne and I were talking about life, ourselves and general random nonsense. The words themselves were not the focus, and only with effort could I sense they were there at all. I am not even sure it had any language attached; it was just an expression of emotion and human connection and the syllables were nothing more than subtle diagnostic beeps that indicated both organisms were functioning as normal. We talked and talked; but what we said did not matter. We were just there, as ourselves and that was all that existence was.

I turned my attention to the wondrous mountains that surrounded us. They seemed to just emerge out of the backdrop like icebergs, and though distant, towered over us from the impossible horizon. I imagined one collapsing: the tidal wave it would produce would surely reach us; with the water so shallow. It would wash us away. It could kill us. An intense anxiety ran through me and I became transfixed with the idea that we had to leave this place.

"Aaaaa  aaaa aaaaaa?" JulieAnne asked. It had no meaning, but it told me to come back to reality. I rejoined the conversation and the familiar relaxation and calm came over me. we continued talking. Before long my attention creeped back to the mountains, and once again I worried about what might happen if they started to crumble and fall into the surrounding ocean. And once again, I came back to the calming conversation and forgot all about it. After a time; I decided that the collapse was inevitable and we should really leave at some point. I told her this, and we agreed to swim back to the shore.

We paddled back on our boards slowly, arms and legs hanging over the sides, and continued our conversation, savouring it for every last second. As we headed back our dialogue had started to resemble language once more. It still bore that calming feeling; that representation of the interpersonal connection we both shared, but as the linguistic meaning came more and more into focus, the emotional magic of the exchange drifted ever into the background. We began talking about what we would do once we were back on shore. She had to work, and did not look forward to it. I had to work too; but not till much later. I did not dread it as much as her. We were now almost at the shore line, and people were standing around a wooden landing that was level with the rising and falling waterline.

Back on shore, there was a distance between us, and we both looked out into the ocean; realising we would rather be back out there, floating in peace. The collapsing mountains now seemed like a distant and empty concern, and I am not even sure we even believed it was going to happen any more. We talked about our stresses and our everyday lives, she had patients to treat and I had to sort out what I was doing with my elaborate plans. We parted ways, and I went about the rest of the dream. That anxiety of the mountains collapsing never quite left me: in fact it ghosted me for the remainder of this dream in a very subtle form, and I woke up feeling it too. It had nothing to do with impending doom, I think it was just the feeling of drifting away from another being, and it was the feeling of being alone.

๑

I hoped you enjoyed reading this. Some dreams are best left to intuition, and for once neuroscience has nothing it can tell me that I did not already know. And while that is becoming a rarer and rarer thing for me these days; it is something I continue to search for. Sometimes there is more to be said without an answer than with one.

Northcote Tip: exploration and exploitation

6/11/2014: Three days later...
IMAGE: caoimhghin

The following is a vivid dream I had some nights ago. It took me well back to my childhood, in the sense that I have not had a dream like this in quite some time. If I had to explain it: I would probably put it into the category of pure adventure.

The dream basically consists of me exploring a place that is familiar to me, and very much rooted in every day life. When some arbitrary boundary is crossed (such as a doorway or fence) and the dream takes a dramatic change, and reality goes out the window. This boundary bridges the dream world with the fantasy architecture and psychedelic form of the imagination itself. And the endless discovery of the unreal brings with it a kind of pure unadulterated excitement with every dreaming step that reliably evades description. I will now attempt a summary of the dreams events and what they mean to me.

I was in my back yard at my old childhood house in Northcote. This can be a very strange and almost dream-like suburb in its own right (anyone who grew up here in the 90's will know what I mean) but for the purposes of this dream, I was a child again in my childhood home, and everything was normal. I was exploring my back garden, when suddenly I walked out past my back fence into the bluestone laneway behind my house. These are another curiosity too: originally build so that horse-drawn carts could take away human waste by night; some Melbourne suburbs have simply preserved them and they serve no known human purpose that I know of except puncturing bicycle tires and scaring the hell out of young children. The laneway behind my house always served as a mystical curiosity to me, growing up... you never knew what out would find in one. They each had their own curious personality; and they allowed you access to the proverbial underbelly of the quiet suburban streets all around. A friend and I used to explore them on our BMX's on school holidays and probably increased our emotional intelligence by a decade in the process.

So back to my dream! I stepped into this laneway, and reality gave up on itself. It was a little like peering into the fridge in the original Ghostbusters; except that I did not scream but was overcome with an intense sense of curiosity, euphoria, and awe mixed in with a discrete foreboding and a creeping lucidity that this should really not be here. When I think on it: this dream is very much part and parcel a homology of a much older recurring dream I would have, involving zombies. This dream takes a very different flavour however; it is almost always set during daylight hours, and almost always involves either my own house or the house of a close relative. Otherwise, I suppose the two dreams are very much the same.

Instead of looking into my laneway: I found myself gazing into a sprawling post-apocalyptic / Mad Max-esque complex or compound. Some voiceless narrator told me "Aaah, so that is Northcote Tip. Too bad it burned down". Another brief piece of inner-north history: Nothcote once had a brickworks with accompanying clay quarry. By the time I was old enough to know any different; all the clay was gone and it was now used for landfill (non-colonial types might know a tip better as "rubbish dump"). If laneways scared you as a child: then the tip was probably Hades itself. I was never so brave to explore it myself, though I went to school with those that would. They were mostly refugees from the 91' invasion of Kuwait or Khmer Rouge holocaust survivors so I don't hold myself too harshly for this.

As I started to explore the fabled and forbidden Northcote Tip at the end of my back garden, I became immediately aware (in the sense that you can become aware, but not actually know it) that this was not the tip at all, but actually a sprawling thrift shop. At one end, people would deposit their junk, and at the other end, there was some sort of showroom for refurbished furniture, vintage collectables and all manner of things. In a sense then it was a tip. In the middle section, were a series of workshops where the owner would restore and categorise the junk for later sale. Sections were, true to in-dream cannon, burned down or otherwise destroyed. Various couches and motorbikes lay spread all over the workshop floor, in varying stages of deconstruction and repair. The narrators voice picked up once more: "The owner went crazy, and burned it all down. Such a shame" and a sadness it me. I had only just discovered this marvellous institution and already it was gone and never coming back. The speechless voice continued... "Then again, you would have to be half-crazy to run this place to begin with"  and my emotions shifted to a kind of easy come, easy go mentality. Indeed the voice (and by voice I mean some temporarily discrete agent of my own stream of consciousness) was entirely right. But this is a dream blog, not a sociology one so I will skip this thought for now.

Neuroscience time! I have had these dreams regularly enough; and so do other people. My brother has often recited the delight he has experienced in reoccurring dreams involving discovering hidden rooms in his apartment and the the subsequent joy and excitement of exploring them. I started having dreams like this when I was probably 6 years old: I would recurrently dream that there was a secret toy shop in the wall behind a strange mirror in my parents bedroom. Each morning I would run in and look behind it; and each morning I would be disappointed that the room was not there. It did not even matter that behind this wall was nothing more than a garden pathway and a thicket of bamboo; nor even that my primitive child-like spatial perception should and did know this to be true: the emotion of discovery was real enough (or had been real enough) in itself that my mandate to check went un-contested. It's not even like the secret room was all that great: it was simply the joy of discovering it against the odds that would send my dreaming brain into overdrive.

True enough; these later dreams are something of an advancement of these earlier ones in that my lucidity is aroused when discovering the in-dream anomaly, alas it pushes itself down (or is pushed down) to allow me to continue to explore, despite my better knowledge. And on this note, I do have a theory. Since the early battle taking place is between my curiosity and my better knowledge, this whole exercise could be nothing more than a case of my prefrontal cortex working out at what point curiosity kills the cat. And by this I mean: how euphoric an event can reliably be before judgement is suspended and emotion takes over. Useful training in real life for countering confidence men, sex workers, asshole supervisors and god knows who else. I probably never have fallen for the antics of any of the above precisely because my dreaming brain prepares me so rigorously. But is this why I have these dreams?

I think that rather than determining at what magical point emotional pleasure will drive me out of secondary consciousness, the purpose of these dreams is rather to train my curiosity and remind me of what it is like to explore and discover. Much has been publicised recently about the crucial role of curiosity in learning and positive cognitive function. I could always have told you this over beers but it's nice to see it in published science too. I conclude that such dreams are intended to keep curiosity alive, so that it is not forgotten. And this is achieved by engineering dreams with infinite pay-off sums that produce impossible and unfathomable rewards, with euphoria to match, through the act of exploring the ever day and the mundane. And thus an upper-bound in a homoeostatic range is defined and we can more realistically make spot judgements in regard to the exploration exploitation dilemma when ultra-high pay-offs with minimal risk are concerned.

We may not wake up the next day and literally expect a phantasmagorical realm to unfold before our very eyes, when we open that cupboard door or venture beyond the outgrowth of our gardens. We are awake, we are conscious and we simply know better. But at some deep, basal emotional level, we still retain the feeling of what it would be like. And that part of us gives us hope; and makes sure that we do not forget. And despite our pesky narrators voice: it keeps us searching for something we have yet to find, and probably never will.

★★★