The Fox's Secret

So far I’ve blogged about many different kinds of dreams.  I’ve talked about dreams that had religious significance.  I’ve pondered the philosophical implications of the kinds of altered states of consciousness that are opened up to us in dreams.  I’ve even talked about dreams that had some pretty sinister characters and some scary situations in them.

But it might seem surprising that this blog has been on-line for almost two months now and I have yet to write an account of that most frightening kind of dream that we all dread having–an out and out nightmare.

In my opinion, a nightmare goes beyond the simple occurrence of a frightening situation or two in a dream.  Despite some scary situations, I wouldn’t classify any of the dreams I’ve discussed previously on this site as nightmares mostly because there was too much thinking going on.  There is something, in my opinion, about my nightmares that is much more primal.  Whether it’s being chased by a monster or unseen force, being attacked by strange people or animals, or whether it’s about falling from cliffs or being obliterated by nuclear weapons, a nightmare tends to produce, in me at least, a feeling of being hunted.

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After reading the dream from the previous post, you might ask yourself how I could start to write a story from it.  After all, it would be an odd story indeed that took place during the aftermath of a nuclear war that took place during the Clinton presidency.  What would I need to explain something like that?  Some weird time travel or alternate universe timeline?  That’s a bit far-fetched, even for me.  If you’re writing a poem, some bizarre juxtapositions might help you out.  But if you want to write a story, it’s best if you at least make it plausible.

So the first thing you need to do in writing a dream story is to discard anything that you just can’t find an explanation for at all.  The next thing to do is focus not so much on the events but on the overall feel of the dream–what emotions did it evoke.  In the dream that I had, the primary feelings I felt were about fearing death and doing whatever it took to survive.  That’s what I decided to make my story about.  And the most critical event that brought all of those feelings to a head was the point where I had to drown another human being to save my own life.  So that’s where I started.  And this was the beginning of a story I came up with:

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Now that I’ve narrated a specific dream that I have had, I want to break it down a bit and see some of the many things that the dream might have to tell us.  If you haven’t read the story of the dream, that’s probably okay because I’ll be quoting the relevant excerpts, but it would definitely help to put it all in context by reading it here.

Before I get into finding a particular meaning or set of meanings to the dream, I first want to use this post to point out a couple of features that are relevant to what the science of dreaming has taught us in recent years.  My next entry will look at possible symbolic interpretations.  Let’s take a look at the beginning of the dream and see how it reflects the state of the brain during REM sleep:

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In what follows I describe one of several dreams in which I encounter what feels like the same character even if he appears differently in all of them.  To date there have been five such dreams, but I would not be surprised if dreams involving this figure crop up again in the future.

Who is this figure?  Well, his character evolves a bit over the many dreams but I might describe him, in short, as The Fool, The Trickster or The Joker.  He’s not a light-hearted comedian or naive adventurer, however.  He has a decidedly sinister aspect to him (it’s alwayas been a “him” so far) and despite his foolish appearance always seems to be one step ahead of me with yet another card up his sleeve.  This dream marked his first appearance and it occurred early last fall–just a little less than a year ago.  The dream happened as follows:

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