What Dreams Are Made Of

In the story Dreamcatcher by Stephen King, Gary Ambrose "Jonesy" Jones is thoroughly intelligent that he has organized his mind like a library, filing away memories in rooms. However, King does not mention how Jonesy's memories are cross-referenced in order to keep his memories organized.

One must assume that whatever system is used, the owner of those memories, be it Jonesy or you or I, it would be organized in order to remember what happened in a person's past. When certain memories are not needed for recall, due either to their relative triviality or to their lack of relevance to the present, then they get "archived" i.e. moved into a storage room, the part of long-term memory, and "forgotten" in the Subconscious.

However, memories are never forgotten completely.

Over the course of years, some of them get "edited" and compressed into a terse form which is the synopsis of the original memory, especially the first memories involving emotions and feelings. Indeed, each person develops "archetypes" which are symbols of those memories that may arise in dreams from time to time.

My mind is not unlike Jonesy's, and for that matter, King's if it may be assumed that Dreamcatcher's characters are extensions of his own mind written down to document the author's innermost fears and the manner in which he vents those fears in creative storytelling.

Over the past year, I have had three dreams in which I explore a town and come across a place that I never have dreamed before then.

In the first dream, I happened on this apartment building in which people lived. It started in the subbasement and after it ended, the memory of it faded. I also saw bits and pieces of that dreameorld community.

In the second dream, I came across the apartment itself which was by a river. What I remember about it was the services room, which reminded me of welfare office and also of a homeless shelter.

In the third dream, which happened within the past two hours, I was in a room that is the common area for a group of roommates. One of those men, Mr Malice, tried to trap me between two pieces of furniture but I had the strength to prevent injury, and seeing that he had failed, he fled.

Mr Malice represents guilt and regret, the two complex emotions which arise when a person commits an error that he regrets and is aggrieved by guilt. 

By facing the malice of self recrimination without  awakening from the ensuing nightmare due to fear of death, guilt and regret quickly flee.

Such feelings and emotions are due to events in a person's life.

In my case, two days ago, I had made an error in filling out a work report and was called to task about it by my supervisor. Since then I have resolved to fully report my work day rather than keep it brief.

So possibly my mind emphasized all of this by conjuring up Mr. Malice trying to harm me. He failed because it was not his intent to harm me, but to remind me of my intent to fulfill my work duty.

For the mind, when it dreams, is always on the side of its owner, be it you or I. When it finds that my conscious will may have forgotten my obligations in real life, the mind will convey this in a dream, which may have a climax to remind me. We fail to recognize this at our own risk.

In a way, dreams may be due to the superego (conscience) using archetypes hidden in the subconscious to direct the ego (conscious will) along a path straitened by the inner moral compass (super-ego) despite the id (unconscious will) desiring to be free as a bird. Yet the id provides motivation via the libido to preserve life through acts that either create new life or create the world that is the mind. In response to the id, the mind then directs the body to act in a manner that reflects the inner world of the mind.

Thus, dreams are a part of the inner world of a person. Dreams help each of us to explore that world called the mind where memories are kept with the aid of the id, the ego and the super-ego. With their help, we are inspired to become productive members of society.

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Id, ego, super-ego: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id,_ego_and_super-ego

Male and Female Triad of Archetypes in My Dream

It's been about 5 days on my new cyclobenzaprine (10 gm) & gabapentin (100 mg) prescription.

I've noticed dreams during onset to stage 2 sleep. The content of the dreams isn't upsetting, though in the one which awoke me, the main theme I notice is three paired male-female archetypes. Another thing I've notice is that these dreams have started over the past two days when I have used 100 mg gabapentin rather than the usual 200 mg.

Most likely this is due to a combination of having had a full day of being outdoors.

Tuesday I spent time in Vancouver first at the library, then at English Bay and took a lot of pictures; then I went to UBC for the pizza & Pepsi for $3.50 & went home. Wednesday I spent time at UBC, used the free Internet, did some errands and then returned home.

The reason why I feel that the dreams are due to being out and about is because in the past, sometimes I have a dream that's so full of content that I wake up.

While I cannot prove if my dreams are the result of recent existential memories being transfered from short-term to long-term memory, the fact that I awoke tonight implies that I had a larger set of memories accumulated over two days to transfer.

My hypothesis is that dreams are the side effect of memory transfer from short-term to long-term memory. Everything in that dream is symbolic of that memory transfer even though the content of that dream may be off-topic and sometimes out of this world.

Tonight the characters in the dream were 3 females, one a young girl (virgin), the same age as my roommate (maiden), and possibly an elderly woman (crome). The young girl had been befriended by the maiden, but on asking the maiden if she had called the virgin's mother, the maiden got upset. At some point some kind of kitchen utensil is involved and there is a risk of harming the virgin. The maiden is getting angrier and angrier because I am questioning this polite thing to do. The "I" is the observer and I've forgotten the other two male archetypes. Another aspect of the dream is that it's the same place I am going to which is dreamland's analog of reality. Oh, I met the young girl's family, though have forgotten how many members in that family. Possibly it's three including the girl.

The virgin-maiden-crone archetype appears to be similar to the Freudian id-ego-superego, so I will refer to the male archetypes as id, ego, and superego.

The reason why I remember more about the female archetypes than the male has to do with my hypothesis that a person dreams about the opposite gender to help balance out the dominance of his or her own gender. I feel that the romantic notion of a sex dream is wishful thinking on the part of psychotherapists designed more to entertain than to an accurate description of a dream. YMMV

The female triad of archetypes is also myth-poetic, which appeals to me; the male triad of archetypes is not, which represents my current rejection of Freudian archetypes. Indeed, that is why I do not remember nor can I describe the other two males besides the observer. This is because I feel that one cannot separate the male triad of archetypes, for they are homogeneous elements i.e. id=ego=superego, mixed together as one. This implies that I = (id+ego+superego) in the past two dreams.

Even in the dream, the virgin and maiden were only present, I believe, because the maiden is actually the composite of maiden-crone. As a side note, my female roommate had a hysterectomy, and that might have been encoded into the dream as the composite female archetype.

I'm pretty sure this familiar place I return to in my dreams is the analog of the memory transfer going on. This implies that each building I have seen in my dreams, and the different places are actually places where I store memory. This even includes the cars, the river, and the people. It would take a dream dictionary to discover what emotions are being stored with the experiences I have had over the past 60 hours.

I also believe that dreams are entertainment to help relieve the boredom of sleep.

Anyway, I"m going to take another gabapentin, and see if I have another dream...