This essay is the fourth in a series comprising Rolodex Dreams; How They Arise; Headful and Life with the Snippets
In the Strength Weekly essay ‘Headful’ the conscious mind is described as being perpetually full of apparently rootless fragments and snippets in addition to coherent thoughts and memories. These items are easily or deliberately ignored and routinely discounted. Their elusiveness makes them seem as if glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. Some of them – if they are identifiable at all – may appear more than once, as if they had some purpose, perhaps a mission of some sort. In the past and even now, to some extent, it may have been more straightforward to regard them as ghosts rather than aspects of oneself.
It not necessary to supernaturalise them, however. If the presence of fleeting figments of consciousness is found intriguing rather than of scant significance then it might be useful to view some of them, not all of them, as potential components of dreams. Given that stimuli from the outside world crowd upon us without letup and must be sorted and graded if we are to get through the day, and given that packets of mental activity are constantly emerging into consciousness without apparent stimulus but probably from within rather than without then it is conceivable that some portion of the material not directly attributable to the outside world has not only overflowed into consciousness but is apparent for a reason.
At least two categories of fleeting thought come into focus. There are those fragments too small and brief to be identified and therefore ripe for dismissal. In addition there are those of a duration that enables them to be seen as nonsensical or unintelligible or just plain irrelevant. The former are side effects of a massively complex ensemble of electrochemical systems but the latter may be within striking distance of decryption and worthy of retention.
It is also conceivable that the function of the charged fragments resides in their applicability to dreams. If the mind has an innate drive towards the dream then it is clear that in non-sleeping hours this inclination is inhibited. The experience of falling asleep, however, is not always uneventful or abrupt, it is often characterised by the gradual but eventually irresistible dissolving of thoughts and images and their replacement by less coherent and often outlandish material as sleep approaches. This tendency towards apparent incoherence may be a fundamental property of mind.
The incoherent pre-sleep imagery can be regarded as trailers for the extended sequences that we all have once sleep cancels awake. Most people forget most of their dreams, probably because while dreamed incoherence is a language it is conflated with incoherence in the everyday world and dismissed as unworthy of attention. There is continuing debate about the extent to which we impose narratives on our dreams in order to make them acceptable, that is to say even as we recall them we are cleaning them up, perhaps rearranging incidents, patching in memories from elsewhere, recognising elements then consolidating around that recognition.
If this were not done then dreams would be entirely incoherent and we would be compelled to consider if they were therefore trivial or just nonsense. This is quite commonly assumed to be the case but, as suggested above, a different grammar may be in operation.
We should not dismiss the possibility that this disintegration of ordered thought is a form of analysis which, in turn, generates sequences of association that can contribute to an understanding of the ways in which everyday experiences are received and processed beneath the level of consciousness. Unfortunately, these protodreamy fragments are only around for a few seconds before the shutters of night are drawn across them. Doubtless there are techniques available for extending one’s visits to this submarine realm.
It could be argued that very early stages in the structuring of the mind presented a set of conflicting systems designed to privilege the unconscious. At some vague point a very long time ago this relatively uncomplicated hierarchy needed modification in order to facilitate the organisation and continuity of increasingly demanding everyday business. The strong tendency to dream was not extinguished, it was overlaid with borders that were not impenetrable but functioned at the least as brakes upon the possibility that early humans succumbed to magicality and sat around all day until, to their surprise, they starved to death.
However, in order that the trains may run on time and individuals are not absorbed into frequent extended reveries, a vast civilisational apparatus has evolved over millennia to corral and regulate the dreamy side of our nature.
In the ‘The Ego and the Id’ (1923) Freud set out an enduring scheme for an anatomy of consciousness. An interlocking arrangement of systems of expression and regulation would reconcile the continuous, conflicting tendencies of the mind envisaged not as strata or compartments or repositories but dynamic domains in which instincts, drives, memories, wishes, real-world experiences, actions and feelings are aligned with outer-world realities and moral frameworks. None of these constructs or constraints functions optimally. There is spillage, overflow and leakage, there are remnants, offcuts, junk and debris. Nevertheless, some of these discards retain value in that they supply outlines, borders and evidence of the limits of our tastes.
17/04/2025