By Alexandra Rae
The last five were vignettes of hands, bestowing me a touch I could never feel so long as my eyes were closed. Through the darkness they reach towards my subliminal self, and it is here everything real begins to dissipate. My hand is taken by what my brain tells me to be another hand. If there is a body it belongs to, I never remember. I am guided through the darkness, or sometimes it’s a forest; a Transylvanian castle; my childhood mall; the deck of a boat lost at sea. If it is the latter, I know I’m in a nightmare. Somehow the deck always falls through and it is I who succumbs to the violent waters, the hand attached to my own doing nothing to save me. I choke on salt and spume as I try to think of what this all could mean. You should avoid large bodies of water – another hand grabs my ankle and begins to pull down. You fear drowning – skin upon skin as what is left of my body becomes bare; clothes stolen by waves and more calloused fingers grabbing onto flesh. It is what you are trying to suppress that is haunting you – and then the hands, manifestations of my supposed suppressions, drag me towards a darkness the human mind is not meant to conceive, and whether this darkness is an extension of me or an extension of the world I never know, but what is true is my descent towards the same unknown; the black & blue ocean leaking into my lungs; hundreds of hands cajoling me into a soft death.
When I wake, the first thing I see is the drool pooling into the crevasse of my elbow. I instinctively wipe my mouth clean, as if this were the same liquid that keeps killing me in dreamland. The floor is solid when I stand; the only hands that hold me are my own. I breathe. Any remnants of my unconscious fears are squandered – until it is time to dream again.
Photo from Hanna Lerski on flickr
When I first watched A Nightmare on Elm Street (way too young might I add), I was, just like the characters in the film, terrified to fall asleep. While they avoided sleep as a way to avoid death, my terror stemmed from a different kind of knowledge: I knew if I went to sleep, I would dream about Freddy and his knife-glove – the cut of which felt just as real in my head as it did for his victims on the screen. Even as a child I recognized the power of my dreams as one I could never fully control or understand. Just because I willed myself not to dream doesn’t mean the dreams didn’t appear.
“As of recently, my dreams have been plagiarizing my day.”
Bedeviled by our own mind, us humans are as impotent as we are puissant. When we dream, we create (at least partially) a means to escape reality. We fly, dance with the person we haven’t seen in years, shapeshift through bodies and time. Such fantasies require power – but when we can’t escape our own escapisms, is this a sign of the merits of our capabilities or a cyclical weakness; a ritual of imagination provoked by dreaming? Not even the experts know. To this I say: leave it to the artists to unravel what goes on inside our heads.
I pursued my interest in people’s dreams by asking some friends of mine on my Instagram story (@theresonationofalexandra) to write about their own. Everything you see in bold is from one of their responses. I’ll be using their experiences, as well as my own, to explore how we have, interpret, and fail in controlling dreams.
DREAMS AS: OMENS, RUMINATIONS, DESIRES
“I’m always falling. Down a hill, down stairs, down a hole. I never have control.”
To put it the way Oxford Languages puts it, an omen is “an event regarded as a portent of good or evil,” one that has “prophetic significance.” They serve to forewarn us of the misfortune or luck that our futures hold. In dreams, no one ever trusts an omen. People believe the danger of them ceases to exist upon waking. The ocean in my dream is a vehicle of death, formed by a small masochistic part of my brain seeking self-destruction. The ocean at the Floridian beach I swam in as a child is just that: an ocean. Water and seaweed and only the possibility of drowning.
Falling in dreams was one of the most common responses I received from my very unofficial official poll. How many of us have felt the knife of reality pierce us into consciousness when our bodies felt the fall? The only damage done is a leg hanging off the bed or a pillow thrown out of false fear. But the tethering between sleep and wake cannot be denied – once our bodies acknowledge the threat of the omen, its significance lingers until we are ready to face it.
To let go of control and fall, or drown, is against human nature. We want to be valiant and invincible. Nothing can shame us into accepting our mortality!
“Sometimes I believe dreams can be omens or messages from our spiritual guides, ancestors, God, etc... Enlightening us to things we may not want to see.”
Until our own mind does. Then we start watching where we walk and wiping saliva from our mouths. Dreams about falling are often correlated with anxiety and a fear of losing control. We begin to believe in the prophetic visions of failure as a means of preventing the omens from becoming real – but if we’re looking out for the inevitable, isn’t the dream already becoming a reality?
“I had a dream the other day of my family being hunted down by a King Cobra. No one ever dies, but everyone gets bit.”
Dreams about snake bites can symbolize emotional or psychological wounds, past traumas, or unresolved issues. According to spiritual experts of Pinterest, they can also signify the shedding of an old self to make way for a new one.
My friend’s dream about the King Cobra’s hunt haunted me. Every time they sleep, his fangs are waiting to draw blood. His bite becomes their family heirloom.
Their response reminded me of a recurring nightmare from my childhood. In it, I am small and futile. I also have wings, wings that I cannot see but feel as I fly between exotic flora and fauna in a jungle. Fairy of the tropics, I soar underneath a sky marooned by an infinite dusk, with no need for a destination. Fairy me never suspects the ending that asleep, human me knows is coming for her. I dive towards land and dare to skim the surface of a river, my hands greeting its murky waters with an innocent curiosity. Remember the cat and the cause of its demise? The same can be said for little girls.
Before I fly again, a strong pain, a sharp pain, a burning pain divaricates across my lower back. Paralyzed by this intrusion to my body, I fall into the water and am flipped onto my back by the culprit of this nightmare. A giant serpent, scales as dark as midnight, towers above my mangled wings. He (because I am certain it was a he) smiles before striking one final time. I wake before I see the end. My lower back is always throbbing, sciatic nerves traumatized by the bite of a fictitious monster. When I mention having back pain to my family later in the day, I protect the serpent’s identity with a half-truth: “I must have hurt it in my sleep.”
It seems the bane of both my friend’s dream and my childhood one is the same. An ophidian rises from the ashes of our pasts to remind us of how we failed to escape it. Or maybe we both have a hidden fear of snakes. A strong desire to protect ourselves and our families from the world. An insatiable yearning for an endless summer. The dots may never connect, not even between ourselves. I’m not here to psychoanalyze or make assumptions about other people’s heads – but if there are any common threads between us all, I’m not afraid to pull.
If rumination on the past is something to be guilty of, then I am in need of daily salvation. I believe this is how my serpent was born, out of self-repression. For us dreamers plagued by this creature, we are entrapped by the greatest irony of all: a fragment of our imaginations widowed from our defense mechanisms, forcing us to see all things that have yet found cessation.
“I think dreams definitely have a deeper meaning. After reflecting on this one, I think I've always been scared that my love life will interfere with my career.”
If there’s something you want but can’t have, it’s easy to manipulate the outcome in your dreams.
Based on the responses I received, dreams rooted in desire are just as common as those rooted in fear. These desires ranged from imaginative romantic flings to manifestations of the next steps in one’s life – or, like my friend’s confession above, both. It is possible to hold desire and carnage in the same hand.
There are five (broad) areas in which dreams about desire are typically seeded: love, success, wealth, power, and adventure. In my friend’s dream, she was backstage on performance night, un-miked and wigless when she missed her cue to go on stage. Her acting partner kept kissing her on the cheek, leaving her with empty lust and the unraveling of her career. From an outsider’s perspective, the desire here is for a chance to prove oneself in the spotlight. Success, power, possibly wealth. And then there is love, getting in the way of it all.
For any successful woman (and I speak for women specifically because it is the experience I know, but the following can be said for anyone), there is an aura of trepidation surrounding the idea of a love life. We are taught, and perhaps even feel, that having a romantic partner in our lives will be a hindrance to our careers. During the day, we choose one. At night, we dream of the consequences of having both. I myself have been much more invested in my career aspirations as a young woman than I have with any romantic interests. I would never deny this being of my own volition, but I have to wonder if I’ve unknowingly succumbed to some kind of pressure to avoid love quests entirely. If I ever dream of a relationship, it feels forced. For my actress friend, she wants “both so bad but one will inevitably take precedence over the other, and I have to be very careful about which I pick because I can't be missing my cue.” We both confront the things preventing us from embracing the duality of womanhood in our dreams.
ARE WE IN CONTROL?
I asked my friends if they believe they have any power in controlling their dreams. Their responses varied:
“I had control over my body in this dream but I wasn't aware I was dreaming.”
“I think I do. Oftentimes I'm reacting/thinking in my dreams, so even if it's not direct control over my dream self I think there's a level that makes it almost feel like a script, formulaic.”
“I don’t believe I have any control over my dream state. I believe it is a time when your subconscious takes over.”
“Sometimes I have the ability to lucid dream. Lately, thankfully it has been more often. However, to lucid dream I have to realize it is a dream, and I have to avoid saying it out loud. All of the dream people react very strangely if I do.”
To control or let go is the latent content hidden within the question of controlling dreams. There are now studies documenting different techniques people use to try and control their dreams or end nightmares on their own. I sense this is a sign of our modern culture perpetuating rigidity in everything we do – even when we sleep.
I don’t believe I control my dreams. If I did, I would blink away the ocean and the serpent in a heartbeat. Lucid dreaming aside, I think most of us dreamers go to bed knowing we don’t know what’s waiting for us on the other side of REM. That’s part of the beauty and terror of being a human with a brain that isn’t afraid to betray us. We may fly or fall in love in our dreams. We may also be killed, bitten, drowned or pushed off a cliff. Repeatedly. And unless we force ourselves into insomnia like the characters in A Nightmare On Elm Street, we will face these nightmares again.
I am not interested in controlling my dreams. Why take the fun out of the eight (okay, sometimes 4) hours I get to turn my brain off each night? As a writer, I make a similar promise to the narrative. I may wield and bend and mold the narrative as I see fit – but I will never force it to be something it was never supposed to be. There is nothing worse than inauthentic artistry. As far as dreams go, if they are terrifying, I say let them be. There may be something they are trying to tell you that is no longer meant to be ignored.
When I die again tonight, I’ll write about it in the morning.
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