On the Nature of Dreaming: A Note

Dreaming is a mode of experience that involves fascination. It is unlike the presuppositions of our languages, and defies such linguistic ideas as noun and verb. The nature of dreaming is recursively relational, and is founded on the establishment of profound intimacies of identity, meaning and relation.

Whatever consciousness is or may be, in dreaming… it partly dissolves into a state of ambiently self-structuring potential. This is, in part, why our memories or reports of temporality in dreaming conflict with our waking models and expectations. The nature of time in dreaming is related more to experiences of relational intimacy and the ‘overall rate of transmission’ that obtains within these experiences.

But dreaming has another peculiar feature, which is that many if not all dreams, apparently continuously re-include aspects of their own structure (a level meta to the shape or character of the specific experiences) in the content and significations of the dream. That is to say, that as a dream proceeds, it may often become increasingly ‘about its own structure’ in ways that are peculiarly symbolic and often metaphoric.

Although this process begins relatively modestly, over the course of the dream, it ‘builds up’ to a point where, near the conclusion, there is often obvious evidence framed in the circumstances of the transition to waking. That is to say that ‘the end of the dream’ often involves a structural representation of ‘waking up’ that is coherent with the dreaming situations.