Dreams Are Things You Don’t Know

You wake up, suddenly remembering a dream. Maybe you were drowning, or flying, or the common scenario ‘doing a public speech naked’. Without sitting with it, or letting it be, we almost always rush in to explain the experience to either ourselves or someone else:

“I had a dream I was drowning last night”

“No way, so it was a nightmare?”

“Well afterwards I was flying with a dog on my back. But really I think it meant I was trapped because I hate my job.”

Hot takes on Jungian dream theory or symbols in our dreams are for another piece (which I am already excited about). But what I do know is that dreams are often incredibly deep, personal and complex experiences. And because they are so personal, it’s sometimes hard to see the wood for the trees. And that’s what interests me. Why do we rush in to explain ambiguous things? What do we miss when we explain something before we’ve really, truly looked at it?

A comment from social media

What kicked all of this off was a comment I saw on social media, ironically under a Jungian video of all things. A user had written “our dreams never tell us what we already know” and it had earned just 2 likes. I was hovering for a third, but wrote this article instead.

Because whether that’s true or not, that got me thinking. And questioning. How many times have I post-rationalised something, at the expense of understanding it? What is this self-generated certainty?

It’s a kind of paradox, but understanding something can sometimes mean taking things we don’t know, and letting them be just that. Things we don’t know. The issue is that our minds don’t seem to feel comfortable when something is unexplained, so our natural inclination is to do the opposite and fill in the blanks. And dreams, when considering the entirety of our lives, are probably the most immediately nonsensical, impossible and dense experiences we can have. And so the need to understand those is even stronger.

The conceit of understanding

Waking life demands an immediate form of logical attention. If you are going to get on a train, you need to be there at a certain time. For all of the longing and bending of reality you wish existed, that train is leaving then. It’s fair to say then that at least the everyday world demands you approach it in a logical fashion in order to navigate it. That very ability that helps us navigate waking life may then cause us to flatten experiences that don’t need immediate explanation.

Ever watched a film and didn’t fully “get it”? Then days, weeks, sometimes months later it sort of clicks. You find yourself becoming invested in a way you weren’t when you actually watched it. That feels like the same principle at play - this principle of deep understanding. I don’t think this is always something you can wield immediately, especially when you’re presented with things you couldn’t possibly know - and almost every situation in life contains some of those unknowns.

On the surface, this array of disparate things needs organising. It needs explanation. It needs reasoning.

And that’s easy with a film. Most people watch movies and then get on with their lives. That understanding that happens later comes partly from no longer being invested in finding an immediate explanation, and letting the mind do its job.

The cost of immediate interpretation

Another angle to this is that rushing to an interpretation can remove us from other types of understanding. So not only might our first take be wrong, but we may have cut ourselves off from the juiciest fruits of understanding before we’ve even had the chance to find them.

Once we grab on to what something means, that explanation can start informing what we notice and understand next.

“This dream is about my job.”

The flying dog, or even just the way you feel upon awakening, is disregarded.

“That film was pretentious.”

You stop wondering why one scene is still bothering you three days later.

“That idea won’t work.”

You stop noticing the part of it that might have led somewhere better.

Making a choice about what something means is good. We have to at some point. But that choice can become distorted into an organising principle that filters new information to fit what we already decided.

But what if actually understanding sometimes requires tolerating that first unknown state for longer? Even when the outcome may directly affect our own well-being or life.

We can use what I would call Delayed Understanding, which means intentionally not trying to figure something out straight away, in order to leave open the possibility of a deeper understanding later.

This is useful because you go from the usual knee-jerk:

What does this mean?

To generating different questions:

What actually happened? What did I notice?

Delayed Understanding preserves that information.

Choose to Not Know

There is no value in preserving ambiguity about what time your train leaves. The information exists. But many of the things we most want answers to aren’t like that at all.

What is it about this idea that is bothering me?

Why did I hate that film?

Is this project actually happening?

How come I wasn’t asked to lead that?

These kinds of situations have variables you absolutely can’t know. But we often approach them in the same immediate way as the train, as if applying enough reasoning will eventually yield a clear answer.

It means recognising that the situation you’re in may not currently allow, or even contain, the kind of certainty you’re trying to extract from it.

Dreams, as our first example, are contradictory and strange. They’re weird in ways that defy contemporary logic - yet many of us try to use that same daily logic to understand them, which is, in a big way, absurd. The fact is we reason our way towards an explanation before we’ve really looked at what happened all the time.

But that’s just one example. And Delayed Understanding sounds kind of obvious in principle. It’s much harder in practice. When you’re in the moment, anxious for an answer, navigating an important situation or wanting to relieve your uncertainty with a decision, there can be enormous pressure to understand what’s happening before you actually can.

The answers you find become parts of a whole, rather than the whole itself. You delay the pleasure of completing the jigsaw you want, for a potential one which is more useful for you. And instead of deciding you have the answer, you keep asking questions long enough to see what else might be there.

So next time you wake up having dreamt, say, about pineapples falling from the sky, feel the urge to explain and try to resist.

Maybe you’re about to quit your job and realise your dream of becoming an organic strawberry farmer.

Maybe you aren’t.

For now, they can just be pineapples.

Thank you for reading Operating Self. The goal of this endeavour is to provide material for improving the quality of your thinking so you can make your self known.

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Thank you and hope this piece, and what’s on this site, helps you.