Rants and Rambles

I am still reeling from my dreams of the night before last (two of them thanks to the dogs wanting to go out at 6:00 a.m.) and am now suffering the tensions brought on by the dream that was fresh in my mind upon awaking this morning.

I am not certain that I have ever actually seen the psychology text that makes all the claims about dreaming but I can tell you that at least two of the common beliefs about dreams are not correct. At least, they are not correct in my case.

The first misnomer is that dreams only occur during R.E.M. sleep (named due to the Rapid Eye Movement that occurs at this stage) and that R.E.M. sleep takes from about 45 minutes to an hour to reach. I can lie down on the couch on a warm and sunny Sunday afternoon, fall asleep for no more than fifteen minutes and have a dream that feels like it lasted hours. Either I am slipping into R.E.M. sleep exceptionally fast or the psychologists who supposedly say that you only dream while in that state are full of shit.

The second lie that is commonly told (and this despite the fact that many people refute it) is that humans dream in black and white. I am partially colour-blind due to a degeneration of my cones (the colour receptors in the eye). Because of this I essentially see anything with a lot of blue in it (e.g. blue, violet and purple) as blue, anything that is light in tone as either beige (light brown or green) or grey (turquoise, aqua-marine, pink, grey) and anything that is dark in tone as kind of earthy brown. I enjoy mid-tones, get mixed colours confused all the time (e.g. maroon, brick, forest green) and can only tell amber from red if they are together (the brighter one is amber). I essentially live in what is a colour-reduced world where tone (brightness and sheen) tend to be more important than actual colour.

Occasionally this is an advantage. When I was a boy, finding the “brown” army men in the “orange” grass was always easier for me than for my adequately-eyed friends. Also, places where paint has gone on thicker tend to look like whole different colours to me so they stand out and certain camouflage tend to fail (I cannot see hunter orange in a bright green forest but I can see brown and green really well on the same background). More importantly (I see I have rambled off track – the irony of which will be seen in a moment) my dreams are in full and vibrant colour. More amazingly (but hard to describe) is the fact that in my dreams I am very aware of the fact that I can see colour.

I can not explain what this is like; perception simply will not allow it. For example, have you ever heard a fog-horn? If you said yes then take a minute to remember what the fog horn sounded like. Do you actually hear the horn? Do you mentally make a low-noted see-saw sound? Is it the same as hearing a fog horn? Of course it isn’t but, if asked, you would claim to remember having heard one before. Same as remembering the smell of bread baking: You don’t actually smell the bread again when you remember it.

The worst part of being colour blind is being asked: “What do you see blue as?” One of the best parts is replying “Without using the word blue, what do you see blue as?” I can not describe what it is like to see blue in my dreams any more than I can describe what it is like to see a blue sky other than to say, it was such an amazing … well…. blue.

So am I completely exceptional in my dreaming? Am I an alien being of some kind who only shares most of my world and experience with humans? Of course not. I do think, however, that we as a society accept these myths into our common conscious so we can feel special as individuals.

If it is commonly accepted as fact that people dream only in black and white then I (and many other people I have met) are the fabulous and special exceptions to this rule. If it is generally believed that people can only dream while in R.E.M. sleep then, likewise, myself (and probably a few million others) are exceptional. Does this make us “better” than other people? Of course it does. Don’t be offended: it does not make us “better” on any real (i.e tangible or important) scale that is quantifiable or even matters in the greater scheme of things. However, as humans, we have a need to single ourselves out and feel good about it when we can. This lets us feel “better” or “special” for at least a moment. It is all in our own heads of course. I mean, hell, we don’t even know why we dream, what about the fact that some of us dream in colour could be important?

Despite all the work of the good-intentioned simpletons who think equality has something to do with reducing everyone to the lowest common denominator, it is important for each of us to feel “different” than those around us. You even hear people bragging about infections for god’s sake! “When the doctor saw it,” the woman bragged, “he said it was the worst case of multi-ethno-egognosis he had ever seen”. “Oh yeah,” replied the man, “I broke my leg in two places waterskiing and they were both spiral fractures! Do you know how uncommon that is? The Doctor told me that he had never seen that before! And that spiral fractures are the most painful.”

Doctors know that many patients like to be special even if it means being the sickest, or being the sickest and still standing. How many times do we hear “I can not believe your managing to still walk around after what you’ve been through!” It makes us feel good. It makes us feel different than other people: like we are somehow special.

There are a myriad of other examples of this from constantly having high temperatures to low heart rates or being able to hold your breath for greater than the average length of time. With me, maybe it is dreaming in colour (and in linear stories with shifting points of view – they are very exhausting but at least they are interesting) and/or being colour blind.

The point is (if there ever was one) that I think we invent these commonly held beliefs so that we can feel special. Or, maybe, when an idea, even a flawed one, allows the creation of a situation where some people feel special, that idea generally has a good chance of being accepted into common culture. Thus, when someone did a study in 1962 (or whenever – I do not know of any actual study) which found that people dream in black and white, even though the study was seriously flawed it caught on because it made people who dreamed in colour feel more interesting.

There must be a balance though. If the idea makes too many people special it will quickly be “disproved” because when too many people are special in a certain manner that manner of being ceases to be special.

I would like to see a study that shows how few people need to be affected before something like this will become part of our common conscious and how many people need be affected before it falls out again. I think that would be an interesting social experiment.

I could slip from that into other reasons why bad studies become part of our collective conscious but it seems like a good place to end so maybe another day.