Skip a Rope

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Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, touch the ground

Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, turn around.

Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, show your shoe,

Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, that will do!

Children’s rope skipping rhyme.

New Scientist tells us that another step has been taken in understanding dreams. In the July 21st issue they report that our most powerful dreams, theta wave/REM partnerships, appear to be linked with recent life experiences. From there they hypothesize that those dreams have a semi-therapeutic function, allowing us to “process” those experiences. And, in a bit of “blue-sky” theorizing, they wonder if these findings bring us a step closer to using hyper-lucid dreaming to ease our deeper anxieties.

I love it when they do stuff like that - leap to frolicsome assertions out at the very edges of the data - as I consider that tacit permission for me to do the same.

I don’t know if it is an age thing, or a retirement adjustment thing, but my dreams seem increasingly strange these days, particularly after my afternoon nap. In contrast to New Scientist’s assertions that our dreams help us work through our recent issues, my dreams have a tendency to call up a cast of characters from long ago and far away. As a matter of fact, sometimes from so far away that both the characters and the plot line are total mysteries. I awake shaking my head, muttering, “Where did that come from!?”

Here’s a possible answer. Think about the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. In this view of reality every possible version of our life exists, branching out into an infinite number of universes. The implications for dreaming seem obvious - well, maybe not. But the clue is in the title of this post. Here’s the idea.

Dreams are glimpses between the seams of those various universes. In dreams the alternative realities seep together, asserting themselves and reflecting the others. Sometimes the dominant reality of the dream is the same one to which we awake. There is enough similarity to the past we had experienced only a few hours ago that we simply sigh “Weird!” and get on with waking life. Other times the dream reality was so firmly anchored in one of our other “could-have-been, might-have-been, was-in-a-different-time-and-place” realities that you need to just sit for awhile, take a few deep breaths, look around and gradually recognize that yes, this is the reality in which I spend most of my time.

I have come to think of dreams as raising and lowering a curtain on these various realities. We stand inside the jump rope of our existence. The rope passes over our heads, pulling a version of reality along in its arc. We jump and the rope passes beneath our feet. We land. We wake up. Maybe we have returned to the reality we left when dozing off. But maybe we moved a bit forward, or perhaps a shade backward, forward or sideways, up or down into a different version of our infinite number of possible worlds and their associated realities. There really is no way of knowing in which “where-when” we are, and it wouldn’t matter anyway.

That may seem a little disconcerting but it need not be. It is not as if the rope turns and suddenly we find ourself in a reality we do not recognize, gazing at some alien landscape. Our “here and now” will always feel like the correct  “here and now.”  Also we would do well to remember that no matter where we go, we take ourselves along, and we simply need to remain true to that self.  Another source of comfort for me is that no matter where or when the rope may send me skipping, it is most likely that the tenets of Distilled Harmony - and the behaviors they mandate - Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity, and Oppose Harm - like the laws of physics, remain constant throughout our many possible realities.

Sleep tight, sweet dreams.

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