It always has a certain effect on me to hear phrases like “I haven’t dreamed for years” or “Dreams are our unconscious desires” or “We dream about what happens to us because we have experienced it and we bring it back to sleep as a memory”.
Thanks to the latest article on this blog “Cognetti: the annulment of love”, a film reviewed two days ago “Inception” by C. Nolan and an exhibition by Mirò, I felt a strong need to write something about this space, this time, which occupies a third of our existence: the world of dreams.
Reflections and nothing more…maybe. Maybe concepts that will have further insights or answers, who knows!
I’m not sure where to start, in reality I never know, so I start writing, leaving the flow of my thoughts free, hoping they are always clear enough.
Starting from the blog article I quoted before, I must say that the sentence with which it ends before the “happy new year” struck me a lot: “illness is being able to see only the apparent side of reality”; I wonder, those who say that dreams are only memories of things experienced or unconscious desires, don’t they only offer us the apparent side of reality? Doesn’t anyone who says this deny the existence of a world made of imagination and creativity where a non-conscious thought can be interpreted and transformed into the possibility of knowing ourselves better? Doesn’t it deny the ability to know an inner world and a profound dimension where our true essence resides?
And those who don’t dream (or rather, perhaps it would be more correct to say, those who don’t remember their dreams), where does that third of their life disappear? Why does it have no relationship with that profound dimension that can put us face to face with our most intimate truth?
Can we talk about the loss of the irrational world? And we can say that losing this world can lead to rationality in the interhuman relationship which makes us see only the apparent side of reality, leading a person to consider others only as a means, a useful thing, gradually losing affection and true interest for others?
While I was wandering among the paintings on display at the Mirò exhibition, I thought about the irrational world of artists. I was thinking of the first cave paintings in the prehistoric era and we should realize that human beings have always had the need to tell their thoughts, emotions and dreams through images.
Isn’t that what children do when they don’t yet have the ability to speak using verbal language? Theirs is a thought made of images…
I was thinking of Picasso, Matisse, just to name a few. Seeing their works I always thought how powerful their images were and how capable they were of dragging me into a dream world, like inside a dream. I talk about them because personally, few things like painting can, in art, make me feel this way.
They certainly did not cancel that internal world, they were in contact with it. I often looked for the title of the works I was looking at to understand the meaning of the painting from that; then I felt that it doesn’t make much sense because if what we look at is able to make us vibrate and excite us, beauty comes. And that’s what matters without too much explanation.
In “Inception” the protagonist is able to enter the dream world of other people to extract ideas or manipulate their thoughts and subsequent actions upon awakening. Unfortunately, in these dreams it is also his unconscious that makes an incursion and little by little the protagonist’s difficulty in knowing how to recognize and distinguish the dream from reality emerges. For this reason he equips himself with an object that behaves differently in the dream and outside the dream; a top that spins endlessly within dreams and stops and falls to the ground in reality.
Of course it’s a film, but cinema is also another of my passions.
He speaks using images (as poetry can also do or some composers such as Mozart, Debussy who make us create landscapes, faces, heartbeats in our minds only with their touching and brilliant symphonies), so I always try to understand if the director offers ideas of reflections, proposes criticisms or interpretations of one’s own thoughts. I’m not sure how to decipher what Nolan wanted to do, but he certainly captures the importance of the ability to dream.
It purposely leaves us with the final question of whether the protagonist has returned to his real life or is he still dreaming. I like to think that the protagonist has taken advantage of his dreams and has returned to his real life and that the top stops spinning and falls to the ground. Small interesting note: the dreamers return to wakefulness to the sound of music by Edith Piaf “Non, je ne regrette de rien” which perhaps symbolizes the protagonist’s need to face the feelings of guilt for the death of his wife (who continues to appear to him in a dream) and be able to move forward.
I should have come to some conclusions: dreaming is of vital importance just as it is vital to know how to distinguish dreams from reality; artists are irrational, they are capable of staying in touch with their inner world without going crazy; not everyone goes crazy about it. All human beings must maintain or rediscover, where they have lost it, this ability to imagine, have imagination and report beyond the apparent side of reality.
Returning to the article cited at the beginning, I think it is in the phrase “many pitfalls can lurk in the irrational” that many of the questions posed between my lines find answers. But there is a cure for these pitfalls and then you can go back to dreaming, not being afraid to do it, knowing how to distinguish sleep from waking, not being afraid of going crazy.
Mine are obviously just reflections driven by a deep interest in the topics covered; I leave the word to the experts, to those who know more than me and want to add, remove, correct.
Aware that I would still very much like to continue talking about art, dreams, the irrational world, I would like to close with a phrase from the film “Eyes wide shut” by Stanley Kubrick which could perhaps encapsulate everything: “A dream is never just a dream”.
Valeria Verna
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