Why have I stopped dreaming?

2/11/2017 
IMAGE: Martin Grohs

What a difference creativity can make. It has been over a year and a half since I had a thoroughly memorable dream.

Why this has come to pass, is something I will now investigate. Short of feeling disappointed: I am actually rather happy, because I suspect I have come to understand the purpose that dreams ultimately serve.

I am now, for all who may be interested, an enrolled student in a Neuroscience postgraduate program. I study dreams and I study altered states of consciousness, and this is the closest thing to a day job that I have. But curiosity about creativity and creativity itself are hardly one and the same—I suspect this is why the dreams shifted tempo, as it were, and have come alive in waking life.

The short version: I started writing a novel. Becoming a self-educated expert in other people's creative process can only go so far, before one starts to peer behind the curtain, and see the mechanisms of the author's so-called "Magic". Eventually the novels themselves loose their Magic: they become too mechanically obvious, to break disbelief let alone enchant. Eventually, one is left saying, over and over and over—I could have done something better. So I started using trance states. Perhaps I learned this from years of meditation, or perhaps it was from a lifetime of lucid dreaming? Maybe I just looked at the natural borne creatives around me, that I study and live with; and used whatever theory I had uncovered about their twisted and wonderful brains, to find my own way into that place.

It usually begins with typing. The voice inside finds its way up, and reality becomes a tug of war between everything you have ever thought was a real, ongoing, physical world—and a much deeper place beyond. From here things get really difficult. Letting go feels like falling from a very tall place, it feels like slipping into death. But just past that point, there is a whole internal universe too. The fingers tap tap away, and the images just get clearer and clearer. Sounds and emotions emerge with them. And the last vestiges of the material universe—the clack clacking of impossibly rapid keystrokes—too drift into the background, being nothing more than a trail of breadcrumbs to fine one's way back out of the maze.

Were it not for my investigation into dissociative anaesthetics, I may never have learned this either. One might call it the summation of a lifetime of curiosity—and the pushing of one's physical self to satiate that curiosity. It has been 17 months since I had a decent, memorable dream. But in another sense, I have now been dreaming every single day, with my eyes wide open, and my fingers connected to my keyboard, tasked with their description, moving on auto-pilot.

The end result, I am happy to report, is 120k words. It's at least good enough, that I'll be publishing it on Amazon/Kindle very soon. But whether it becomes an obscure sleeper hit, among cognitive science community and the esoterically inclined—or fails to sell a single copy—I have made up my mind, about my dreams, about their purpose and about my own relationship with them.

....the human creative mind seeks nothing, if not for its own authentic expression. And when that creative potential cannot be sufficiently utilised; the dreamworld itself becomes a desperate release—the memories we take back from it,  but a quaint trophy, or souvenir to qualify our own unconscious flexibility. But when fully utilised, and when pushed to its utmost limits—the dreamworld it seems goes silent: for it has found its way into the reality it always craved.