Personal Essay Assignment: The Enigma of Dreaming

The Enigma of Dreaming

Everyone obtains dreams throughout the process of dreaming. The act is so common, yet majestic against any other. As if divulging into an unparalleled universe, the dreamer gets to experience another world, another bursting surreal life, in which there are no limits or expectations. Dreams allow us to be free from our everyday slavery, our rules and regulations. By dreaming, awake or asleep, we can escape into our own personal desires, and hold onto our childhood imaginative sense we all so desperately need and crave.

“There's a long, long trail a-winding into the land of my dreams.”  Wrote Stoddard King, Jr. Multidirectional, our dreams grow and twist like an Oak tree. The branches of the tree serve as the asexual parent of dreams, giving birth to numerous amounts of branches until the tree is in full bloom. Like this plant, a young, innocent little girl dreams of becoming an artist. She sits, by her new easel, smelling the woodwork, breathing in the Cedar. She begins to fantasize about what she will do with her art. She imagines she will imprint her mark into the beams of the sun, the soil below her feet, and everything in between. She will be the heartbeat of the planets. Even known in the heavens, and the angels and cherubs will whisper about her. Her dreams are forever spiraling and growing like the branches on the Oak tree, and there’s always rain and sunlight, feeding their photosynthesis.

When we dream, we let our spirit flow. Our dreaming is so jejune, and at the same moment, so unexplainably natural. It’s as if we are one with everything, and the daily dilemmas of time and love are silenced by an anonymous entity. Whether we are distracted while awake, and slip effortlessly into our unconscious mind, or we are asleep and forcefully jump from the brink of the two airy atmospheres –the known and the unknown– we disappear from what is cemented to what is malleable. Like putty in our hands, we form organic means.

Renowned Psychoanalyst and Neuroscientist, Sigmund Freud, wrote in his work Interpretation of Dreams that, “Some writers flatly assert that dreams know nothing of moral obligations; others as decidedly declare that the moral nature of man persists even in his dream-life.” This leads me to question if the two worlds we exist in are simultaneous. Do take with us our morals, values, and life-learned lessons into our undiscovered world? As if we put all of our beliefs and cognitive emotion in a box, and float through the skies until we reach our unnamable dreaming nirvana. The clouds create a fog and the course is ever changing.

When I doze off into this unchartered territory, this unexplored horizon, I don’t know what to expect. It is as if I am deity of the art world, Salvador Dali, waiting for my work to paint itself. Sometimes I dream of things that inhabited my thoughts during the day. I dream of the bonds expanding even thicker in my blood, between those I was derived from, my family. Their souls so ultimately connected to mine, they exist where I exist. Yet, other times I dream of non-relatable things, people and stories I don’t know in my waking life. Strange things, dreams that make my skin rise in small circles, and make my knees shake. My mind may wrap around them for hours on end.

I sit here, feeling peculiar. I imagine a hand, doused with pure glimmering skin, emerging from a starry night sky. The hand is open, inviting. I want to grab it, but I’m not sure how. I now create a hand, birthed from my forehead like Greek Goddess Athena was birthed from Zeus. Full grown, and armored with my inherent qualities, the hand is sure of itself. It knows no boundaries, only desires. However, existing still in consciousness I am unsure of this unknown voyage. Will the connection of daily occurrences and nightly dreaming ever be more than tedious analyzing? Was Edgar Allan Poe right when he wrote, “Everything you see or seem is but a dream within a dream”?

It has been said for centuries, maybe even eons that those who dream, succeed. Although, what is success? Leaving out a societal standpoint, I believe it is achieving that in which we want most. What is the formula for this dream, what is its genetic makeup? How does one have a dream that creates something life changing, something not normative? Some say that truth and time tell all, but where does this fit into our complex state of dreaming? How can we find the validity and accuracy in something almost paranormal?

Whether awake or asleep, we dream. These images and visions come to us, either randomly, or fatefully. Sometimes, our dreams are like meeting a stranger, forever mysterious and enticing. In other instances, they’re like passing a familiar face on the street. You stop and stare in both scenarios, dumbfounded. We may pry with our fingernails at the “Pandora’s Box” of our alter dream world, trying to let out the secret of our dreams, the good and the bad.          

I believe the box is buried deep in a tomb, sealed shut. Only the wind, the earth, and the stars know the true being it bestows, and they keep their secret safe, inhumed in the depths of the galaxy, that holds the key that can unlock all of the confusion and perplexity of dreaming. The question is will this this inspiring key, ever be found? Or will the universe swallow it whole, before we have the chance?