Dreams: Flying Through the Eye of the Needle

The Dream Which Threads the Eye of the Needle Between the Conscious and Subconcious Minds

Introduction:

Everybody dreams. Have you ever tried to write down accounts of your dreams? There was a time when I conducted a little “experiment of the mind”, where I would make it a point to try to write down what I could remember of the dreams that I had, shortly after awakening, while the memories were still fresh in my mind. After a while, I accumulated a number of written accounts of the dreams I had.

Here are a couple of the accounts, which in this entry are based on dreams which I had on the night of November 25, 2009:

The Dreams:

Flying on the Bike

I set out riding on a bicycle to try to prove some kind of point; exactly what point I was trying to prove I don’t know, but as I rode, the bicycle lifted up into the air, and I remember sort of gliding along, just above the level of the highest telephone wires. There was a tape recorder and a small paintbrush which sat on a small rack which I had installed on the handlebars. These items were not fastened down in any way, and I was a bit amazed that they did not slip off the rack and fall to the ground. It was just a matter of keeping everything level as I rode. If I slowed down too much, I would lose altitude, and would have to pedal harder to go back upwards. As I rode, I saw that I was headed towards some telephone wires, and would have to pedal harder to go above them. As I tried to do this, it seemed that the pedals were harder to push on than before. I cleared the telephone wires, but as I turned in the air to start heading back home, I realized that I was losing altitude again. As I tried to pedal faster, it again seemed harder to do so, and it was as if I had shifted into a higher gear on the bike or something, although I did not recall doing so. By pedaling at a moderately hard pressure, I was again able to start gaining altitude, but realized that I was going to have to do so at a fairly steep rate, as there were obstacles that I needed to clear. The handlebars of the bike tilted, and the tape recorder on the rack began sliding, and I was not able to stop it before it fell off. I watched as it began to fall towards the ground. I was expecting to see it quickly fall to a crashing end, with its broken pieces strewn about the ground, and thought to myself that it was an old recorder which was usually just stored away most of the time; but I was rather amazed to see it rather slowly descending downwards, as if an invisible parachute were attached to it! It reached the ground at just below moderate speed, apparently still in one piece. I landed the bike, and went over and picked up the recorder. It did have some visible damage to it, as some of the parts may have been a bit bent, but I was curious to see if it still worked. I straightened out some of the bent parts, and put a tape into the machine, and then reached over to press “Play”…

At this moment, I awoke from the dream, and became vaguely aware that it was still dark, and I that I still felt tired, so I again drifted back to sleep. (I may never know if that dream tape recorder still worked or not, and I don’t feel too satisfied with trying to make up an ending to the story while awake…)

Do They Like My Artwork?

The next dream which I remember is how I was in a classroom, and had a stack of my artwork on the desk I was sitting at. I was only visiting the place as a former student. A former art teacher of mine came up to the stack and started looking through it, without asking me. They seemed interested in what they saw, and I was a bit pleasantly surprised that they had perhaps been curious enough in it to have started looking through it without asking first. I watched as they looked through the stack, and when they had finished doing so, they seemed to be feeling good about it, so I began to make a little bit of small talk on the work without directly asking them what they thought of it, although I was curious about it. I had the feeling that they may have been impressed, and that little interaction seemed to be leading towards a possible statement from them in that direction, but as I anticipated a positive response, the scene began to fade out into static like those older analog televisions do when the signal becomes weak, and I became more and more aware of the ambient background sounds in my bedroom and the fact that it was starting to get light. So I may never know what that former teacher of mine really would have said about my work in that dream, and as I slipped from the “subconscious dream world” towards the “conscious waking world”, I found that I really couldn’t go back to sleep.

PSYCHOLOGICAL NOTES: What does this say about the workings of the mind? I may be speculating to say this, but somehow there seem to be many “levels of consciousness”; not necessarily always in a mystic or spiritual manner, but also in a wakeful and sleeping manner. And these levels or “modes” of consciousness seem to be very different from each other, in some ways as day and night differ from each other, with a brief intermediate “twilight zone” between them. It’s been said that the “Right Brain” and the “Left Brain” perceive the world differently. You may have heard the saying: “Let not your right hand know what your left hand doeth”. While it may or may not be possible to paraphrase that statement to read “Let not your right brain know what your left brain doeth”, would it be a bit more accurate to say “Your conscious mind knows not what your subconscious mind thinketh”? And are there ways to let these “minds” be more aware of what they think and do?

In these particular dreams, I happened to awaken before the dreams reached a conclusion; I’m not sure what percentage of my dreams end in that manner. It’s interesting that awakening from an unfinished dream can leave one feeling a bit frustrated, like having the signal go out when you are watching a movie that is just about to reach the ending – after all, it’s only a dream, isn’t it?

Nonetheless, I have often wondered if dreams are a kind of way that the subconscious mind communicates with the conscious mind, like a dream bird flying through the eye of the needle that sews the conscious and subconscious minds together…

The Dream Which Threads the Eye of the Needle Between the Conscious and Subconcious Minds