h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I keep a dream-diary, and I get a lot of ideas for poetry and stories from dreams. I also have a lot of different ideas (and questions) as to what and why dreams are.

I've read that "dream deprivation" can be as bad if not worse than sleep deprivation. In an experiment on California (where else?) people who were allowed to sleep but not enter the REM stage began showing signs of extreme stress, irritability, even hallucinating after only a few days. If I remember correctly, there was a correlation between I.Q. and dreaming, too; the brighter the person, the more they "needed" to dream.

I've read one theory that dreams are the subconscious mind communicating with the conscious; if that's true, and I admit that there are times when my dreams seem to be exactly that, what about people who don't dream (or claim they don't)? Do they just not remember, or is there some kind of dissociation going on?

My mother - a highly "intelligent" woman academically - is one of these people. She's also one of the least empathic people I've ever met, and the least "creative". Her "conscious" life is one of deliberate denial, which makes me wonder if she's deliberately cut herself off from her dream-self. If so, what came first, I wonder, the denial or the blocking of dreams?

One thing I've noticed about my own dreams is that they often "dramatise" problems in my life, either past or present, and sometimes even suggest solutions. Perhaps because I actively welcome dreams (I spend the first five minutes of every day just remembering them) and write them down as soon as possible, I'm allowing myself to access my own subconscious?

I can't imagine what it would be like not to dream. Often my dreams are "lucid", in the sense that I know I'm dreaming and can control the dream environment. The first few times this happened spontaeously, and I woke up immediately. Over the years, I've learned to take control without waking, but tend only to do this if a nightmare, which I'm prone to, gets out of control. I like to let my dreams run their course.

However, this phenomenon (and plenty of other people do it, type Lucid Dreaming into Google and check it out!) seems to me to disprove, or at least contradict, the "subconscious communication" hypothesis; surely no-one can take control of their own subconscious, which is what it would amount to. And what about "prophetic dreams"? I've occasionally had them, about small domestic occurrences, but I believe there are some well-documented cases of genuine "premonitions" of more important events, plane crashes, that kind of thing.

I'm currently working on (amongst other things) a sci-fi short story about professional dreamers; this of course pre-supposes the ability to record and replay dreams, making them into a form of entertainment. I won't go into the whole plot, mostly because the story seems to be taking on a life of its own and heading towards a quite different ending from the one I "dreamed up", but also because I intend to post it sometime and would like people to read it without expectations. Anyway, that's why I'm exploring these ideas here and now.

I'm sure that people who write (or paint, or compose etc.) are also people who dream. Maybe you don't make such a performance of it as I do, diaries and records and all that, but I'd be interested to hear if anyone else has dream-inspirations, or theories, or insights, or even opinions. For instance, I've also read that when we dream, we're exploring the "astral plane". That might explain why I sometimes have such a distinct feeling that there are other "people" in my dreams; mostly the other "characters" are people I know, obvious memories or projections, but occasionally I've woken up with a real conviction that I'd been "sharing" a dream.

One thing I am sure of is that dreams are important. Wherever they come from, or wherever we go, I find that my dreams often shed valuable light on day-to-day problems and help me to resolve them. Even nightmares, by dramatising my deepest fears and making them accessible, can be useful. I don't like them much, and as I said above, I've learned to either take control or just wake up when they're too intense. Even so, just having a problem pointed out to me (by my subconscious or whatever else dreams may actually be) is often the first step towards resolution.

So, all dreams welcome. If you have any ideas, theories, opinions or examples, you know where to send them.