Supernatural Dreams

I had a dream the other night. We all have dreams, every night apparently, but this one was a little different.

What I remember from the dream is that I was hanging out with some friends. We were in maybe our 30s. Not sure of the location, but it was vaguely like a rooftop bar, at night. It felt like the place might soon be showing a movie on a wall screen.

So I’m sitting there in a chair, and one of our friends comes up the stairs and says, “The most beautiful woman I have ever seen is coming up right behind me.” I didn’t look around; I guess I didn’t think much about it. I had no thoughts on who she might be. But then, a moment later, a woman leans down behind me and kisses me on the cheek. It turned out that the most beautiful woman was my girlfriend!

I’ve had dreams where I was in control, where it was more like a dry run. Like, wait, let’s replay that scene, but this time I’m going to say X instead of Y. And I’ve had dreams where the action proceeds in a flat, linear fashion: something happens, and then something else happens. I might just be an observer; I might say or do something; and then events go on from there.

What mystified me about the beautiful woman dream was that I didn’t see this coming. The “me” who was living through the dream was not aware, at all, of what was going to happen next. In other words, it was like real life.

So my question was, how could that happen? I guess the answer may be that there is a subconscious part of your brain that invents the scenario, and then a conscious part of your brain that lives through what the subconscious part has designed. And to the conscious part, it feels like it’s really happening — you can be genuinely surprised — but it’s all just a story that your mind creates for its own amusement, or for whatever purpose dreams may serve.

In this particular instance, the beautiful girlfriend turned out to be something of a cluster. She proceeded to announce that she had brought a $20 bottle of champagne, so then I had to shake down my friends to chip in and help pay for this extravagance. Then it develops that her beautiful long blonde hair is a wig; it falls off and reveals that she actually has unattractive, short-cropped black hair. And while she did seem very pretty at first, when I got a full, straight-on view of her face, I saw that she resembled Minnie Mouse, with these big, flat, dipshit eyes that made her look like she might be stoned.

But those developments didn’t obscure the feeling that something weird had happened. It stuck with me, as you see: I did not understand how my own mind could surprise itself.

It would have felt like a better answer if someone had explained that, actually, I was getting a glimpse of things that were transpiring, at that very moment, in a parallel universe. It felt real because it was; it just wasn’t real here. Never mind the expensive champagne and the Minnie Mouse face; maybe that was something that my own mind inserted, as it recoiled against what it had just seen, converting a legitimate glimpse of a true alternate reality into the scrambled eggs of a normal dream.

Obviously, me wanting to believe that there was an alternate universe would not make it true. But it also wouldn’t make it false. I didn’t want it to be true because of some prior metaphysical commitment. I wanted it to be true because the woman kissing me on the cheek felt so real, and so unexpected — like what might happen, in real life, if she was a new girlfriend and I hadn’t expected her to find me at that bar.

Or if you don’t like the parallel universe hypothesis, how about this: I have a guardian angel who sees that I’m lonesome, and she sends me a little company, in the form of a memory of what it was like to be in my 30s and have a pretty new girlfriend who would show up and kiss me.

From there, granted, it’s only a hop and a skip to the point where the person feeling sorry for me is not an angel; it’s just me. Some subterranean part of my mind is inventing narratives that my conscious self follows, in my sleep, naively believing whatever the subconscious part tells it.

That, or some more fully informed scientific alternative, may truly be the best explanation. The problem is that this sort of explanation feels like something that science pulls out of a hat, to dazzle us for a moment and then be mostly forgotten. It is like an intellectual bill of attainder, designed not to provide a real explanation, but just to criminalize a line of thought that science dislikes.

I mean, if this subconscious part of me is cranking out random narratives to fit the mood of the moment, why is it only doing so when I’m asleep? It seems suspiciously convenient to use this mechanism to explain away what I imagine in my sleep, but to completely disregard it in waking life.

If we really believed that the subconscious mind explained our mental wanderings at night, why wouldn’t it dominate accounts of our daytime thoughts too? Why are we not constantly referring to that interior storyteller, every time we think about a career decision or discuss a murder trial?

We take our surface-level thoughts and feelings at face value for purposes of interpreting waking reality; but since our sleeptime thoughts and feelings don’t fit with waking reality, we assume they must be wrong. We let people tell us that there’s no accounting for the goofy stuff that happens in our heads at night, yet nobody is willing to extend comparable latitude to what happens in our heads in the daytime.

Those thoughts may just reveal my ignorance. But this is the crucial fact: science does not respond to my ignorance — or, more to the point, to our interesting and sometimes disturbing nighttime mental experiences — with genuine curiosity, always seeking to find out whether, hey, maybe there really is a guardian angel. Science is the one with a religious commitment, the one that already knows what it wants to believe. There is by God not going to be any guardian angel. There is going to be an alternate universe only if a physicist can explain how that could possibly occur — and, even then, the physicist is going to tell me that, in my lifetime, there will probably be no scientific explanation that could connect a parallel universe with my funky dream.

So it’s a sort of bait-and-switch: we know that we are not going to treat what you saw in your disturbing dream as part of an alternate reality; we also know that it is not due to any supernatural phenomena; we just can’t explain how we know these things. That is what passes for science these days. It is truly closer to medieval religious belief than it is to genuine curiosity and a desire to learn.

I came to that impression of the situation because, after having the dream, I went looking for the best book that would offer a sympathetic yet knowledgeable consideration of the things I have just said. I wanted a book that was informed about the science of dreams, and yet was not blinded by prior commitment to an atheistic dogma that already “knew” all about my dream. I wanted something that would rise above the secular conviction that, regardless of the facts, my dream could never, ever be what it felt like. I was looking for curiosity, as I say — not for a tedious precommitment to explain away everything that didn’t fit within the dominant creed.

There may be such a book. If so, I didn’t find it. I found what seemed to be scientists who considered themselves oh-so-brilliant as they talked down to us superstitious fools who would be deceived by our own thoughts and feelings.

I am the first person to say that I don’t trust the thoughts and feelings of the ignorant masses in matters of politics. I certainly don’t believe that my thoughts and feelings are more reliable than the things that a careful scientist can figure out. Unbiased expertise is hard to beat. But the emphasis is on the word “unbiased.” Show me a scientist who is seriously asking whether my dream may have been due to an alternate universe or a guardian angel. That’s the scientist whose book I’m looking for.