Articulating the Rainbow

Most of my dreams have a notably pronounced tendency toward the surreal.  In them I can fly or suddenly speak Chinese, magical events transpire and the laws of physics are laws no longer.  These dreams are normally great fun, occasionally terrifying and, when I’m having one, there usually comes a point where part of me realises that I am dreaming allowing me to take control of what’s going on.  Sometimes I can actually turn what started as a nightmare into a fantastic thrill ride.

I also have incredibly mundane dreams on a fairly regular basis.  I dream about giving lectures, taking a shower, walking my dogs, reading a book or writing e-mail.  Dreams of this type cause me the most trouble.  Often they are so vivid, detailed and indiscernible from my waking life that I don’t realise I never took certain actions, never read certain words or sent a particular e-mail for quite some time.  This results in lost time and, occasionally some embarrassment on my part.  For example, I recently had lunch with a colleague and we were discussing a course we are both teaching on.  I began to refer to a very detailed summary of an assignment our students are meant to complete contained in the course handbook.  She looked at me blankly.  I pulled my handbook from my bag to show her the section I was talking about.  It wasn’t there.  It was only then I realised I dreamt the entire experience and I had to explain to this person what had happened.

 

Title Page of the First, German Edition of Freud's Seminal Work on Dreams

 

Whether I wake after a night gliding across the far reaches of space and time, running from demons or to the delayed realisation that the last few chapters I read of a book I’m researching were my sleeping creation I don’t tend to worry too much about what my dreams mean.  I’ve read the psychoanalytical theories of Freud and others and I’ve had a look at spiritual or metaphysical ways of considering dreams  that might best be described as new age.  I haven’t ever bothered to keep anything like a dream diary or subjected my slumbering perceptions to a careful psychoanalytical unpicking apart from as an intellectual exercise  that I wasn’t really qualified to perform.  Doing so just didn’t seem relevant.

I won’t deny the possibility that they may be some real use to some of these various ways of gleaning some deeper meaning from dreams, but I’m generally not worried about what my dreams might mean.  If in my night-time reverie I fancy I’m piloting a flying, Esperanto speaking bus to a seaside resort to see a concert with my wife and dogs I take it at face value.  That’s the kind of bizarre story I invent for my own amusement when I’m awake and I don’t see any reason to think that’s not what’s going on when I’m asleep.

Normally my mundane dreams, the ones I have such a hard time distinguishing from actual life, focus on questions I’ve been thinking a great deal about, tasks I’ve been devoting a lot of my time to or upcoming commitments or events that are preoccupying me.  Again, I don’t think it’s too surprising that I dream about these things.  If I’ve spent 14 hours reading all of a particular critic’s work on a given subject and then dream I’ve read a bit more I don’t feel any need to go looking for some deeper, hidden meaning of that dream.  Sometimes I come up with a good question this way, but that’s rare.  Generally it’s a sign that I’ve been working very, possibly too, hard on a given topic and that I need to give my mind half an hour to do something different instead of a signal that I have some long repressed impulse to smother my chest in yak butter while performing a mating dance for a shiitake mushroom.  All that being said, the dream I had last night was something of an exception.

In many respects it was one of those mundane dreams that it takes me some time to recognise never actually happened, and while I don’t think it had any hidden meaning, I do think it at least verged on the status of metaphor and symbol.  In the dream my wife and I had collected our dog from the vet (he made it home safely yesterday afternoon) and to celebrate, had taken both dogs out for an afternoon stroll.  As we neared home at the walk’s end we were caught in a sudden downpour of rain even though the sky ahead and above us appeared to cloud free.  Knowing what I might find I scanned the firmament to discover  a rainbow.  This wasn’t just any rainbow though.  It was the largest I’d ever seen, its bands of colour were all bright and distinctly defined to the extent it looked solid and it was centred directly over our house.  I’ve always loved looking at rainbows but this one filled me with a sense of awe and wonder at the beauty that can exist in the world.  It reminded me that, despite my highly strung personality and pessimistic tendencies, life can be and is pretty good.  All I wanted to do at that point was to tell my wife what I was thinking and feeling, to make her understand how fortunate I feel to have her beauty in my life and to be able share mine with hers. My mind and heart were in a joyous tumult, they felt near to bursting and I wanted to let some of what was in me out.

I couldn’t.  I opened my mouth to speak and all I that would come out was “Look, a rainbow.”  I tried again, “pretty, huh?”  She assented.  I gave it one more go “I like it,” and then abandoned the attempt as futile.  My mind and heart were overflowing but I couldn’t articulate even the smallest portion of my thoughts and feelings.   This inability to make myself understood caused me a great deal of frustration and pain, both of which I was still feeling when I had the dogs out this morning.  It was only when I neared home that I realised the whole experience must have been a dream.   The dog who had been anaesthetised by the vet was too groggy yesterday  to go out for a walk, so we’d never gone.  I couldn’t have been caught in that downpour, nor could I have seen that rainbow.

As I said, I don’t think that my dream of a rainbow I could point out without articulating what it roused within me had any hidden meaning.  It was, however, a definite manifestation of and something that troubles me even though I’m not always conscious of my anxiety.  It’s very rare that I feel able to actually give any kind of voice to  my thoughts and feelings let alone those I think are most important.  That’s not to say I don’t try, but the words I use and the way I combine them seem somehow inadequate and inexpressive of the meanings I feel and see in the way that I felt and saw something more than just colours in that dreamt rainbow.  The expression of my real meaning always feel elusive, and my tongue seems tied.

Given my propensity to spew words both in conversation and in my writing my felt inability to actually articulate meaning may seem surprising.  I think it’s part of why I talk so much, why I’ve spent so much of my life reading books and then writing about them, why I write lectures and, probably, why I write this blog.  I’m trying to pin meaning down in language but it keeps slipping away.  Until I can finally explain something, anything, to my own satisfaction I’ll never be sure that I’ve actually managed to say any of the things I have in me that want to come out.  Instead I’ll be pointing and grunting in an over-educated and polysyllabic manner.

So why was it a rainbow that I dreamt of?  I think it’s because you can’t touch a rainbow.  It appears to stand still but it’s made up of moving particle-waves of light that can be perceived by human eyes, but not held by human hands.  The rainbow is like the shifting, ephemeral thoughts and meanings that take hold of my consciousness and that I want to articulate through language which seems the most powerful tool at my disposal.  It may be, but so far it’s a tool that seems to course and too concrete to capture and express what it is I have to say.

I can explain a rainbow scientifically, poetically, or somewhere in between but I can’t make my listeners or readers really see a rainbow as I do, cannot feel or understand the tumult this insubstantial phenomenon can cause in me.  Not yet anyway.  In the meantime all I can do is point at and yearn for something that remains tantalizingly just beyond my reach.