In Dreams

Who can say what happens at the gates of horn and ivory, somewhere beyond the wall of sleep?  Most people dream, and most people who dream attempt to remember their dreams.  Do we do this just to complete the puzzle of the night's events?  Is it simply the pursuit of a frisson whose end comes in remembrance, no more meaningful than checking the morning headlines to learn what happened while our eyes were closed?

Literature, at least,  assigns a special role to sleep.  Spectral visitors are common in the somnolent hours--I think first of Hector's bloody ghost and the phantom in the dreams of Xerxes.  Aeneas and Xerxes recount and analyze these dreams because they are warnings and admonitions about the waking world.  But nocturnal ghosts need not be all business, and the emotional effect of a dream is perhaps an even greater incentive to those who wish to recall it.

In one of my favorite passages in Euripides, Admetus voices the desire of many a widow and widower. 

Alcestis, 354-356 (tr. Richmond Lattimore): 

                                                     You could come
to see me in my dreams and comfort me.  For they
who love find a time's sweetness in the visions of the night.

                                                 ἐν δ᾽ ὀνείρασιν
φοιτῶσά μ᾽ εὐφραίνοις ἄν: ἡδὺ γὰρ φίλους
κἀν νυκτὶ λεύσσειν, ὅντιν᾽ ἂν παρῇ χρόνον.

Dreams are a setting where one can experience joys denied by life's cruel circumstances, but always with a catch.  Admetus realizes it is only a time's sweetness before his sense of loss is renewed.  Like all outstanding experiences in life, the best dreams are bittersweet.  The most vivid and enjoyable can be a nightly Pisgah sight, whose conclusion leaves us resentful of the necessity of waking.  Seeming so real, they tempt us to believe they are another reality, another existence outside of our own.  In the daylight we reconstruct this existence only from the fleeting impressions that remain.

Borges said it well in his lecture on nightmares (Seven Nights, tr. Eliot Weinberger):

We don't know exactly what happens in dreams.  It is not impossible that, during dreams we are in heaven, we are in hell.  Perhaps we are someone, the someone whom Shakespeare called "the thing I am"; perhaps we are ourselves, perhaps we are God.  All of this we forget at waking.  We can only examine the memory of a dream, the poor memory.