"There is nothing more boring than other people's dreams," goes the accepted wisdom. But I can't find it in myself to feel bored when someone says, "I dreamed that whenever you got annoyed you started shooting lizards from your eyes" or "I dreamed I was eating a coathanger."
There are many more boring things, such as other people's family trees and Bono and road cones. I've always remembered a Jenny Bornholdt poem in which she dreams that she tried to fax her publisher a cake. I remember vivid dreams for weeks, especially those that leave residual dread or happiness or shame upon waking, like a recent scene in which I was scolded by a beekeeper for training all of his bees to sit and stay, like dogs. "You're distracting them, you idiot," he hissed. I woke up feeling chastened.
Popular culture demands that we fill our lives with things that are interesting. Like moths to the flame, we blunder towards noteworthy podcasts and surprising facts and counterintuitive perspectives. We run from the rewards that a boring conversation about dreams may offer.
For many years I had alarmingly vivid dreams. At night Ferris wheels full of sheep would careen towards me menacingly over dark paddocks. People around me would turn into melting human candles. Instead of hands, I had two irritable pelicans. I think all this was in part due to an anti-depressant medication I was taking. Recently I tapered off the medication for six months, promptly lost my marbles and had to go back on it. Now the dreams are back and they're sillier than ever. Before I go to sleep I feel both curiosity and unease: what's in store for me? Is my father going to float through the window disguised as Microsoft's Clippy again?
The modern dream theory popularised by Carl Jung asserts that dreams offer a true reading of the psyche and that our dreaming selves therefore have important insights for our waking selves. Given the content of my dreams, I would prefer this not to be true. But I also doubt that our dreams are wholly meaningless blather. I like the sleep researcher Matthew Walker's argument that dreams are like "overnight therapy", allowing us to reprocess stuff we've experienced, taking the sting out of difficulty and pain and confusion and helping us to carry on tomorrow.
