DREAM CATCHER

Dream

Catcher

“I'm lying in bed and a buzz breaks the silence, I open my eyes and see a wasp, angrily bouncing off the closed window unable to escape, unable to stop buzzing. So, I get up and I go over and open the window and it lands on the windowsill, but it doesn’t go out. I look a bit closer and it's not a fly, it’s a monkey, about the size of my hand. Slightly concerned that there's a miniature monkey in my house in suburban Edinburgh, I try and coax it out the window but instead it jumps back inside my room and disappears under my bed. Before I have a chance to try and get it back out, however, I spot it walking back out from under my bed, followed by three others. So three of the monkeys jump up onto the windowsill and out of my open window, one of them is struggling to climb up onto my window, I bend down to help it up and realise it’s Casie (a friend of mine), well its Casie’s head on a little monkey and she's chatting away to me. At which point my mum walks in and offers Casie breakfast before she heads off with the other monkeys. And then I woke up.”

A stunned silence greets the end of my story. Well, I think Mr Leask is stunned but the rest of the class probably drifted off to sleep themselves midway through the story. This is a regular morning in the L6R form class, Mr Leask intrigued by my psychotic dreams (mainly because he never remembers his dreams) while the rest of the class is thoroughly bored. We try and decipher meanings out of the jumbled-up stories that form my dreams, and regularly someone chips in with, “you’ve gone mad”. I’ve always been fascinated by my dreams, in awe at the storylines my subconscious puts together, the next famous director with its plots and scandalous tales, that I could never dream of when awake. There must be more to dreams than just hinting at my impending insanity, as many have suggested.

Dreams come in all shapes and sizes: recurring ones, stress dreams, dreams which you can’t distinguish from real life - I have certainly looked at people in a different light after having had a strange encounter with them in my dreams’- I one time had a very vivid dream that Mrs Bryce was stalking me, but I think it would probably be unfair to hold that against her, as the real Mrs Bryce has no such obsession. Equally, I was very disappointed one morning when I woke to discover that I was, in fact, not best friends with Simone Biles (4-time Olympic gold medallist gymnast) and that I hadn’t actually bumped into her in my hairdressers, only in my dream.

15

I’ve been to Hogwarts and to Peru in my dreams, I’ve even been to G9 in my dreams- slightly less adventurous I’ll admit. But what does it all mean? Does it mean anything at all?

Corona virus has given me the time to research and answer this question; ‘Can we interpret our dreams?’ And I think the most accurate answer is: ‘if you want to’. Over time the understanding of dreams has changed, as has the understanding of most things. Gone are the days when people believed that dreams are God’s way of communicating with humans, or that dreams can predict the future. Inevitably in the big bad world of ‘The Internet,’ there are many different theories and interpretations about dreaming as it is something we still have very little understanding of, but this is the conclusion I have come to. Dreams can’t tell us anything we don’t already know; they just rearrange thoughts that were already in our heads and show them to us in a different way. Some of it is likely to be nonsense but in amongst the rubbish there could be a profound metaphorical commentary on some aspect of your life. It is only fair for me to add that often people are more likely to believe something they see in their dreams if it is in line with conscious desires and beliefs, so tread lightly, don’t just see what is obvious, what works for you. Nevertheless, I believe that diving into your dreams could give you a better understanding of yourself and your life, bringing to light themes you may not have a chance to notice.

Maybe the more scientific thinkers out there will always be sceptical, so I’ll just say this; Dmitri Mendeleev’s periodic table was created in a dream (although not exactly the same as the modern-day periodic table it is the basis of it, which is central to all chemistry). Similarly, the Beetles song “Yesterday” was largely invented in a dream. So, think about this; the next big hit or scientific discovery may have been in your dream last night but you’re too sceptical to dig a little deeper and analyse what you dreamt.

So, this is a call to arms: LISTEN TO YOUR DREAMS PEOPLE!

By Charlotte L6