Now, I have to say that I’m a bit disappointed. All my life, I believed I had a special talent for:
a. dreaming,
and
b. recalling the details of those dreams
Some may think it’s a rather pathetic thing to be proud of remembering one’s dreams, but please try to bear in mind – we all have our own unique talents, and not everyone is interested in sport.
Why, I’ve often amused myself for minutes at a time, recalling my dream from the night before. I’ve entertained others (who were no doubt riveted, as we all are, to hear the minute details of someone else’s dream), especially when the dream involved halariously illogical, disjointed story lines, unrelated events, and people or animals who morph into other people or animals, or into something else, perhaps a mousetrap, an orange, or a rhino with boiled eggs for eyes.
Once, the remembering process worked backwards. I woke myself up by laughing in my sleep, but then didn’t remember what I’d been dreaming. Maybe that’s not backwards, maybe it’s inside out. Anyway.
Lately, there have been two recurring themes popping up continually in my nightly (metaphorical) wanderings, which are both so dull they are not worth mentioning to anyone. For this reason I thought I’d write a blog post about them. One of these themes is so dull, it goes right off the Richter scale for dullest dream theme possible. It’s….paperwork. Pdfs, to be exact; as opposed to Word docs. Most nights I remember nothing else about these dull things. I just wake up feeling like I’ve spent 8 hours dealing with a lot of pdfs.
This is the cause of my huge disappointment. You’d have to admit, this Paperwork phase seems a real backwards step for someone who once woke herself up laughing. When I compare it with past dreams, suddenly even Rhino with boiled egg eyes begins to seem as rich and complex as James Joyce’s Ulysses (so I’ve heard – I never got past page 7.)
Why, just last night I woke up out a deep sleep at 3am, with the red and white Adobe pdf icon looming in my mind. What, suddenly, my subconscious has nothing more interesting to apply itself to in the dead of night than compiling separate pdfs into a multipage document?
In another dream recently, I’d promised a friend I would fill in some mysterious forms, but I’d left it too late, and was anxiously worrying about how I would tell her that I hadn’t filled them out.
At least the addition of guilt into what I think of as The Paperwork Series provides a skerrick of fodder for a psychoanalyst – a bit more, at least, than a dream about creating pdfs from word documents offers, anyway.
Nevertheless, I’m disappointed overall at the sad lack of boiled eggs, rhinos, handbags, my cat rotating around on a plate,* or any other satisfyingly unrelated objects, or illogical plot developments that one hopes for in a dream.
And I mean, really, if one must dream about pdfs, surely the very least that could happen in the dream is that the documents grow to gigantic proportions, tower over my work place, and start issuing commands to the tiny humans running around below them, in voices that sound like (old-style) Daleks! These current dreams, however, are so pedestrian that if there is any development to the series at all, it will probably be that I create a table of contents and put page numbers into the footer on the right hand side! Woo!
The other recurring theme that keeps popping up at the moment is houses. It’s slightly more interesting than the pdf dream, but only slightly. Every now and then, I dream that we have just moved into a new house, and I look around and realise with a sinking feeling that on close inspection, the new house is actually a bit crummy, and the house we’ve left (which is always the house I currently live in) was much better. It’s the old “sinking feeling” dream, over and over, about the same thing.
At least, for variety, the crummy house we move into is different in every dream. I seem to have an extensive catalogue of imaginary crummy, run-down houses. I guess I’ve lived in a few crummy places in my time.
Houses in dreams are rich containers of symbolism (more so than pdfs in dreams are, anyway). I’ve read enough Jungian psychology, or, truth be told, enough dumbed-down interpretations of Jung’s theories written specifically for lazy people like me to dip into, to know that in dreams, the house functions as a symbol for the self.
When I was younger, my recurring house dream was of being in a house that was both familiar and yet mysterious at the same time. It always seemed like my grandmother’s house, but I would always come across rooms that had never existed in her real house.
According to Jungian theory, finding hidden rooms can mean that there are parts to yourself that are hidden in your subconscious. That seems to fit with me having these dreams of hidden rooms when I was younger and still working out who I was.
But, armed with the knowledge that the house is a symbol for the self, it’s a bit alarming that I’m regularly dreaming about leaving a house that I’m happy with and moving into a house that, on closer inspection, seems a bit dilapidated!
Maybe the recurring house dream is an anxious dream of middle age,** signifying worry about beginning a slow decline, and the cracks beginning to show.
As for dreaming about pdfs, try as I might, I couldn’t find any reference to what Jung thought about those. I suspect it simply means I’m spending way too much time on putting headers and footers into them in my waking hours at the moment.
Either way, this latest, recurring house-related dream has been popping up intermittently for quite some time now. The dream has developed a little in that time, because now it has a meta-layer, i.e, in the dream, I now have a sense of deja vu, and think to myself despondently, this has happened before in my dreams, and now it’s happening for real!
Perhaps because of this, when I wake up from this recurring house-buying dream, that too has become a cliched experience: I always feel a sense of relief, and think to myself, as if I was a character in a creative essay written by some hapless student during a year-12 English exam, despite their English teacher’s warnings never to finish an essay this way,
“Phew – it was all just a dream!”
*
Pic of house: The Quietus
*cat rotating on a plate was in last night’s dream. She was shimmying her bottom back and forth to make it spin, like a record being spun by a DJ.
**or a bit past “middle age” depending on your interpretation of what that means.
Blathering About Nothing 
I believe I live in parallel universe where *your* dreams are *my* reality. I’ve taken on two office jobs just to find a house lately, which means I’m creating a LOT of pdfs in service of finding a home that won’t disappoint me or my family. Sooooo…there’s that.
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Wow, there’s a concept! If that was true, I wonder which creates the other? Do I dream & that becomes your reality or does your reality dictate my dreams? If it’s the dream that comes first then I should warn you that I last night’s dream I was in s shopping centre or somewhere like that, and observed a group of men that seemed like they were British but slightly familiar from Hollywood films, cavorting around with shopping trolleys in a “tally ho lads” way (scenes from the beautiful 1981 Australian film directed by Peter Weir, called Gallipoli, where the soldiers are on leave in Cairo, would give you the right feel) but what strikes me as odd on remembering the dream (but during the dream gave no cause for comment) is that they were all wearing costume nappies and nothing else. You’ve been warned.
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I seldom experience a dream whose narrative elements are so coherent that I remember them on waking up and can recount them to myself and others. I think I can count such dreams on the fingers of one hand and, perhaps because of that, I remember them.
Dreams have a strangely compelling quality to them and I therefore understand why superstitious folk believe that they are messages from God or forecasts of the future. I dreamed of a friend who had died some time before and, though we had not been not close and I had not thought about him recently, the dream haunted my mind for several days. It would have been easy to see it as a ‘message from beyond the grave’ had I been so inclined.
I do not believe that the ‘meaning’ of dreams is as straightforward as some people would have us believe. If the unconscious speaks in riddles, it is probably because the unconscious has no very clear idea of what it is trying to say. Nor do I believe that the objects that appear in dreams have fixed symbolic meanings. I see this as a reductio ad absurdum that favours only those charlatans who claim to ‘interpret’ our dreams. The house or the horse we dream of can be just a house or a horse. They of course resemble houses and horses we know because we cannot dream of what we have never known, only of what we have experienced.
Why do we dream; what are dreams for? That, I think, is the mystery. They must serve some purpose because we all dream, both humans and other species. No theory of dreams that I have come across wholly convinces me. I think that, like religions, such theories may contain fragments of truth but none has put all the pieces together into a complete and coherent picture. One will perhaps emerge eventually but even then, I think dreams will retain their ability to amuse, intrigue and frighten us.
(Where you dream of the ever-unfinished pdf documents, I dream that I have just stepped out of the workplace for a coffee break, suddenly realize I have been away for far too long but then cannot find my way back to work. This is probably the unconscious trying to express some inchoate feelings of anxiety.)
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I’m thoroughly into my own dreams too. Though I have noticed that it is extremely difficult to convey the content to others. I don’t buy into the dream interpretation folk lore of generic symbolism for what we dream about. I think it all relates directly to our own lives, and is therefore highly individual. Although that’s an interesting point from Jung about the empty rooms. I had a recent recurring theme, well it happened three times in one week! I was buying a takeaway coffee for myself and someone else, and every time I walked out of the shop forgetting to take the coffee. I interpreted as being acute stress. I mean, I would have to be under a lot of pressure to leave coffee behind! It was interesting that I was always buying two; because I hardly ever do that, given that I have no colleagues working with me – that was clearly an anxiety theme of wishing to alleviate my isolation. Great stuff, the dreams!
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Mostly I agree about symbolism being personal but I think the house thing is right – it seems to resonate with me anyway. I believe that you wouldn’t leave s coffee behind – you manage to work your love of coffee into many of your comments! I reckon your interpretation of that dream sounds about right. They are great, just one reason why I love sleep so much! 🙂
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Me too. My favourites are the epic cinematic ones 🙂
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