Anything Can Happen
There’s a story that, recording once late into the night, Keith Richards happened to fall asleep in his studio. When he woke up, the tape was still running… and sometime between going to sleep and waking he had somehow recorded the iconic opening riff to (Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.
He had no recollection of it.
I personally haven’t recorded any music in the night, and my attempts at capturing my dreams on paper have resulted in unintelligible and undecipherable scrawls, but I am still fascinated and enchanted by what happens when we sleep. Those rich liminal moments floating between wakefulness and slumber always leave me wanting more, wishing to catch hold of whatever it was I glimpsed, however dimly, in those mists.
There is something ancient and magical about our dreams, our drifting thoughts, even our moments of deepest sleep. We have access then to a different world, a place where the laws of everyday life no longer apply. Beyond this lie dragons… but there are angels here, too.
Musicians and visual artists and writers all know about this mysterious country, but only a few manage to remember it. Like Richards, some artists can seize that access, keep the door ajar, let some of its light spill into our world, even when they don’t remember doing it or manage to summon it back in the brightness of day.
Ursula K. Le Guin's novel The Lathe of Heaven introduces a character whose dreams shape reality. Sigmund Freud, while not himself an artist, continues to exert significant influence over culture at all levels, and his work was taken up enthusiastically by the Surrealists, for whom dreaming represented total liberation from social, scientific, and aesthetic strictures.
It's not just a matter of liberation, though; it’s how we create things that never existed before, even in our own minds. French philosopher Michel Foucault wrote that “every act of imagination points implicitly to the dream… the dream is the first condition of its possibility.”
It’s estimated that by the end of our lives, most of us will have spent 50,000 hours dreaming. That’s both wonderful and frightening. How can I account for that time? What have I transferred from my unconscious into the world?
A short story, one that’s been fermenting in the back of my mind, is the result of experiencing the dreams I do remember. Recently I seem to be doing much of my dreaming in the early mornings just before awakening, and by and large they’ve been fairly unpleasant dreams. One morning as I was crossly remembering what had woken me up, I thought how wonderful it would be to have someone else take on my bad dreams. Someone for whom they wouldn’t have the same personal connections. So now I’m imagining a story in which there is in fact an organization that, for a fee, will take on your nightmares. And what if the professional dreamer saw something in the client’s dream, something they weren’t meant to see, something that involved a murder? Wouldn’t that be an interesting thing to think about? A challenging puzzle to solve?
Perhaps one day I’ll write it. In the meantime, it’s enough to linger on the borderline, the times and places where our rational minds give in to something different, something powerful, something amazing. Space may well be “the final frontier,” as Star Trek would have it; but I think there’s a lot more to learn about without leaving the confines of our own heads.
image: Vidar Nordii-Mathisen for Unsplash