A couple of hours cruising the Internet leads me to the conclusion that while lots of people can wax philosophical, romantic, poetic, scientific, and "eruditic" about dreams; no one can say more than "it seems to happen in the brain when you are either asleep, sort of asleep, or maybe a little bit asleep; and your eyes are moving rapidly back and forth - or sometimes not - and dreams can go on for hours, or minutes, or perhaps seconds - oh, and we usually forget them." What I love about this kind of uncertainty is that you can really just espouse whatever you like about dreams and, if you take it seriously - or maybe put it into a neat song or poem - maybe someone else will take it seriously too.
OK, I want to go back to ideas I was playing with a couple of posts ago - https://schragwall.blogspot.com/2025/09/dreams-harmony-et-al.html - when I was talking about life as a spiral each iteration of which contains some repeated similar - often powerful - experiences distributed throughout our lives. That reminds me of something I remember reading somewhere about "peak experiences." Probably Abraham Maslow. Wikipedia gives us this:
"Maslow described them [peak experiences] as rare, exciting, oceanic, deeply moving, exhilarating, elevating experiences that generate an advanced form of perceiving reality, and are even mystic and magical in their effect upon the experiencer."
So, I'm thinking that even if peak experiences are rare, related forms of them reoccur throughout our lives. Think falling in love, birth of a child, committing to a relationship, creating an important expression - a painting, poem, dance, building, garden, novel - whatever. For me "peak experience" and "strongly harmonic experience" are synonymous terms. The idea I'm playing with is that distributed "strongly harmonic experiences" lead to dreams that tie "the circles/spirals of life" together into a consistent set of chords that reinforce our beliefs, attitudes and behaviors.
So how to test this notion? Ah, there's the rub. To analyze the content of a dream - content analysis, dramatistic analysis, narrative analysis, rhetorical analysis, - name your poison, makes no difference. To analyze the content of your dreams you have to remember - have access to - the content of the dreams.
No doubt our ability to remember dreams varies widely. My wife seems able to recall dreams in significant detail. Me? Not so much. More like "now I see through a glass, darkly," or "through someone else's glasses, briefly." My dreams usually appear to be peopled by strangers and take place in locales primarily defined by lots of hallways and doors within which I am lost and late for something.
But I am working on it, and as I wrote in that previous post linked above, I have lately had fleeting dream glimpses of both recognizable people and environs. But they still slip swiftly away. I realize there are possible solutions to my murky relationship with my dreams. Some folks suggest "dream journals" that you keep bedside and jot down your memories of your dreams. Think about that.
There are some problematic assumptions here. Reach out to bedside table. Grab notebook. Find writing implement. Turn on some form of illumination. Oops. Find glasses. No, the other glasses. Now, write down dream in which. . . um, . . . .? And the idea of using my phone carries a similar chain of requirements - grab phone, turn it on, "Siri, take a note . . ," etc.
What I am looking for is a single button recording device that I can keep in my bed - under my pillow or just next to me. (Debates regarding snoring, temperature concerns, iPad usage and blanket stealing have been resolved by separate bedrooms.) This would, I believe, result in a "grab device, press button, speak - eyes need not be open" process. Such a scenario for dream recording could yield usable data for dream analysis.
Now, I have some preconceived ideas regarding what those recordings will reveal. However my academic history demands that I regard those ideas as merely hypotheses, and those hypotheses must be tested against the data. It's called the scientific method and is, contrary to the idiosyncratic and glibly reversible reasoning underlying much current national policy, necessary for determining our best guess regarding truth.
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P.S. A word about AI, which - as should be obvious in occasion font and spacing errors - I will never use. If I wanted to use AI generated words or styles, I would have written them myself. Jeeez. No wonder American kids rank near the bottom of international rankings of reading and writing ability.
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