Chapter Seven - On Dreams

 

We dream much of paradise, or rather of a number of successive paradises, but each of them is, long before we die, a paradise lost, in which we should feel ourselves lost too.

Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah

 

 

Dreams are a favorite topic for a psychoanalyst as they were for Proust. Of course, Sigmund Freud said, "dreams are the royal road to the unconscious" by which he meant that dreams communicate thoughts and emotions that are not available to our daytime selves. Dreams allow the unconscious to do its work using parallel processing instead of the linear processing that we use in our conscious minds. While we dream, we work up solutions to the problems of the day. There are some lovely studies done by two Dutch researchers who try to identify which problems were best solved by our conscious minds and which by our unconscious minds. As it turns out, with complex problems with multiple variables, It is best to sleep on it. This chapter on dreams delves into the dream work that happens while we sleep.