Keep Dreaming

     I had an elaborate, and cheesy, post planned on the subject of dreams. In it, I would have first admitted to only remembering my dreams on extremely rare occasions; but don't worry; I would have gone on to explain that a writer thinks only in dreams, in stories, and in this way, I can dream. In all honesty I was not at all excited to write it.
     I was then so lucky as to come across something interesting enough to replace that fluff. I just finished watching a television show in which one of the characters had a brain disorder that made him unable to dream. I googled the disorder, and while the name in the show was falsified, there is actually a real-life condition. Charcot-Wilbrand syndrome is a condition in which a person is unable to revisualise images or memories - their brain just doesn't record them - so they have no substance with which to build dreams. CWS is extremely rare, but it is caused by severe brain trauma, most often strokes.
     The character in the TV show explained the disorder thusly: "Do you know what that's like? Not to be able to dream? You never rest, not really. It's like being awake for fifteen years." This is an interesting idea, that we can only rest in dreams, in falsified worlds that allow us to leave the solidity of Earth. So, if dreams last for mere seconds, in our six-nine hours a night of lazing our minds recover only in those last few moments. I'm not claiming that we all shouldn't sleep. Sleeping is fantastic, and our bodies need the rest of those hours to recover. But, if we were unable to dream would our minds ever get a break? Do you think at some point they would just give up? We survive in our dreams.
     But what of bad dreams? Hamlet claims in Act 2, Scene 2 to have such dreams: "I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams." Does Hamlet claim, here, to literally have frightful dreams, or is he admitting to simply dreaming poorly? I don't remember my dreams often; does my lack of recall mean I am a bad dreamer? I still have dreams; my brain functions just enough to build worlds, but not often does it remember its creations, and this brings us to the most important idea in this whole revelation. We survive in our dreams - our minds recover their sanity as they construct novels; our minds can act alone in this, and we do not need to be aware of their discoveries in order to recover our conscious sanity. We must simply bask in our own creations.
     It is when we try to understand them that they become Bottom's Dream. No dream has a bottom.

Keep dreaming,
Sabrina