Dreams

Dreams are really very puzzling things. Sometimes they seem to make all the sense in the world, and sometimes there is nothing about Great Aunt Marge chassing you on rollerskates that suggests intelligent design. Of course, there are people like Sigmund Froyd who believe that dreams spring from the unconscious. In allot of ways, that seems fairly reasonable. If Great Aunt Marge secretly terrified you as a child, a nightmare with her at your heels might spring from some reality. You might not even reaslize she ever scared you - and think it hillarious when you wake up - but lurking in your unconscious the image of her never quite rests in peace. I think we've all experienced that. But there's another kind of dream that can be quite fascinating; the kind of dream that just cannot have sprung from any experience conscious or unconscious. You wake and feel like you've walked in another world, spoken another language, or been part of something that seemed almost more real that reality. Tolkien apparently experienced a particularly vivid form of this, as did his son, Christopher. In the Notion Club Papers (a fascinating read if you ever get the chance) Tolkien dwells upon this in depth. Ransom, a philologist and proffessor at Oxford, experiments with his dreams, attempting to access a different timeperiod through them. The story was unfortunately never finished, and it almost seems like Tolkien could never make up his mind about the outcome of such an attempt. Practically, dreams definately cannot be used as a timemachine, transporting us physically back or forward, but the idea that we can access a different time or place in our dreams I find very interesting. Who knows? That faerie land may still be open to those who dream.