Nobody knows why we dream. Millions of years of evolution,
eye-popping advancements in neuroscience and general scientific research, and
yet there’s not one person on this planet who can explain to me why I dreamt
last week about being locked in a jail cell with Steve Urkel from “Family
Matters.”
This actually happened.
The only reason I can still
remember it is because the dream was so disconcertingly real and vivid that
when I awoke, it took a matter of minutes before I realized I was in my
apartment, sweating and clutching a Garfield stuffed animal. (Hey, don’t judge
me.) Some of the details are fuzzy, but I remember looking through a set of
bars at a gawking gaggle of old high school classmates, some of whom I haven’t
seen since pagers were considered cool. Sitting next to me on a bunk bed was
the iconic 80s sitcom nerd, decked out in his trademark glasses and suspenders,
asking me if I had any cheese.
I did not, in fact, have any
cheese. It’s a testament to how real the dream was that I remember being
disappointed about this.
There have been a handful of
times in my life when I’ve yearned for some kind of in-depth dream analysis,
and I’d love to hear a professional’s take on my faux acid trip. A psychiatrist
would no doubt find symbolism in every little detail: The high school entourage
representing a yearning for familiarity and the past, the jail representing my
entrapment in the present. Steve Urkel representing my love of dairy products.
That’ll be $125, please.
It’s unclear from my five minutes
of Internet research that there’s any validity to dream analysis. Were I to
seek it out, it would be with the same indulgent interest I’d express in
getting my palms read -- entertaining, sure, but a lot of hocus pocus, nothing
to be taken too seriously. Because the fact is that we still don’t know the
purpose of dreams. There are theories, some more plausible than others, and
there are encouraging lines of research being conducted. But the brain is still
largely a mystery. For all I know I was dreaming about jail because of that
nasty crime I’m thinking about committing. Which reminds me, I need to buy a
length of rope and a 12-pack of industrial-strength suction cups.
For all the research that’s been
conducted, there are only subtle clues here and there as to what this dreaming
business is really all about. Some believe it’s a way for the brain to process
memory and emotion. There’s an area of the brain called the hippocampus, and
disappointingly, it has nothing to do with hippopotamuses playing disc golf and
learning algebra; rather, it’s a big lump of brain that theorists surmise takes
short-term memories and transfers them over to the neocortex, where long-term
memory is stored. It’s possible that dreaming helps along this process of
essentially moving stuff around from one storage unit to another. So the
Reader’s Digest version would go something like this: You go to bed having just
learned the shocking news that your half-sister Alice once partied in the back
of Snoop Dogg’s tour bus. A week of dreams, and then poof! You’ll never forget
it. As much as you might try. And try. And try.
And of course there’s the
psychoanalytical take. In the words of the informative but boring-sounding
Medical News Today, dreaming “provides a psychological
space where overwhelming, contradictory, or highly complex notions can be
brought together by the dreaming ego that would be unsettling while awake. This
process serves the need for psychological balance and equilibrium.”
In other
words, dreaming keeps you from going nuts. Possibly. Obviously it’s not a
foolproof method, judging from the number of people who are crazy enough to sit
through the “Alvin and the Chipmunks” movies. But maybe it helps.
Although it
would do little to explain the wacky dreams that sometimes take place during
childhood; I mean, how much psychological maintenance do you need when your
primary concerns are nougat bars and Star Wars? I’ve had two recurring dreams
in my life, and both took place when I was very, very young. In the earlier
one, Superman was dead, and his ghost was haunting my hometown, which in the
dream was an old-timey, Ichabod Crane-type village with smoking chimneys and
shoddily-clad townspeople washing linens in buckets by dusty roadsides. My
mother and I were Ghostbusters. Assigned to the Superman case, we zapped the
zombified comic book character with our ghostbusting implements, which were
made from the dead branches of a nearby maple tree. His ectoplasmic essence was
trapped inside the contents of a dog-eared comic, where he belonged. When I
awoke I had mixed emotions: Yay for me and my spectre-defying mom, boo to the
idea of the favorite son of Krypton lying dead on a sheet of flimsy newsprint.
I hadn’t been that confused since … well, ever, since I was 6.
Now I ask you,
what in the name of Clark Kent would a dream like that do for my psychological
stability? I’m guessing not much, since I grew up to write columns about heavy
metal and duck farts.
Since nobody
seems to have a definitive answer to the dream question, perhaps the truth lies
in none of the above. Over the past few years I’ve noticed that my dreams are
always more vivid during bouts of heavy reading, so it’s possible they’re
nothing more than the subconscious expression of our imaginations -- a
slumbering creature stretching its limbs, testing its boundaries. The jail, the
spectators, all of it just shadow puppets cast by the more impish inclinations
of our minds. Too bad no one can say for sure.
One of these
days I’ll ask Steve Urkel. Maybe he knows.
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