Every night I dream of Jumbo. The “Everything Dreams Book” tells me that these lurid, pachydermic visions portend “wealth, honor, and a steadfast character.” However, when I bring my good fortunes up in conversation, people seem to look at me strangely. Dreams are uniquely “intimate and decidedly singular,” yet we all inevitably succumb to them. They are an intensely personal experience but simultaneously universal, a form of a sleeping contradiction.
For millennia, humankind has sought desperately to understand the host of bizarre, frightening and enlightening sleeping phenomena that are dreams. Ancient Chinese glyphomancy is a practice that searches for word origins and homophones in the literal components of dreams. Hippocrates, the ancient Greek physician, focused on astrological symbolism, ordaining the onset of disease in the constellations. Today, even in casual conversation, we excitedly share our dreams and invite interpretations of them.
Gods across religions have often designed themselves to descend into the realm of dreams, yet I find the human explanation to be even more satisfying. Dreams are a conversation with ourselves. Outside of the bounds of language or society, we are invited to communicate with ourselves alone. They are self-created — sensual, abrupt experiences crafted by our imaginations and directed back at us. Perhaps we fight so hard to interpret our dreams because we seek to interpret ourselves, to read the language of our souls.
To claim full credit for the otherworldly, beautiful dreams that visit us is still folly, for we are entirely helpless to their existence. We lay prone, staring in amazement or horror at the scenes that dance across the inside of our eyelids. Often, after a particularly intense dream, I wake up unsettled. I am not unsettled by the memory of my dream, but I am unsettled by the realization that dreams transcend free will. For a moment, untethered from the taut ropes of daytime consciousness, we lose control. Our minds run wild as we are fully enveloped by the musings of our subconscious — overtaken by our brains, bodies, memories and even the social milieu that creeps into the content of our dreams.
This combination of ingenuity, introspection and insurmountable weakness seems to encapsulate the human character. But dreams are not strictly human. If we dream of sheep to fall asleep, what, then, do sheep dream of? For all our intellect and imagination — our “unique” self-consciousness, the world beyond waking is not wholly ours to claim.
Jumping spiders, lizards, cuttlefish and even zebrafish all seem to engage in dreams. Behind their twitching eyes, electrical signals course through their minds of varying sizes and give birth to beautiful, alien images. These animals’ dreams are dreams well and truly beyond our human understanding, for as invariably gorgeous as a cuttlefish’s dream must be, its consciousness is just as invariably foreign. Animals likely see dream worlds from their own point of view.
Mice may dream about running through mazes, mentally running the course again and remembering their previous day — much in the same way we dream of the metaphorical rat race. REM connected to courtship behavior suggests pigeons dream about love. Pigeons dream about love!
In around the fourth century B.C.E., Zhuang Zhou penned philosophical stories about dreams. In one such story, he dreamed he transformed into a butterfly. But, upon waking, he wondered whether it was in fact a butterfly who dreamt it transformed into a human. Maybe, late at night, bathed in the gentle light of the moon and cocooned by a languid breeze across the Academic Quad, behind those elephantine, bronze-lidded eyes, Jumbo too dreams. Does Jumbo dream of me?
