Dreams and Their Contents
From the drift of sleep to the moment of waking, we are roused from rest — by the ringing of an alarm, the rustlings of a partner, an episode of apnea, or the gentle lift from a well-tuned circadian rhythm. We might not be so lucky each day. The visceral experience of a nightmare can jolt us into a fevered consciousness and leave us disoriented. As children, we may have enlisted an adult to interpret the dream’s meaning or lack thereof — to diffuse our anxiety. We might have been comforted by the idea that ‘it wasn’t real’, that ‘it never occurred’, or that it was because we ‘watched too much’ of something unpleasant. In much of contemporary life, we may be encouraged to ‘see right through’ the fiction of dreams. Since they occur in a different world, they are often ascribed little or no value. ‘Reality’ is what matters. Why spend time thinking about something that never actually happened?
In many historical traditions, dreams were treated as exegetic material — where messages, prophecies, visions, revelations, insights, and truths could be gleaned. Today, the practice of interpreting one’s own dreams is seen to belong to the realms of pseudoscience, where its utility is solely for narrativizing and installing personal meaning. Approaches like defusion and decentering — drawn from Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy and mindfulness-based practices — echo a similar logic to the posture modelled in adulthood: regarding dreams as mere occurrences in sleep, without identifying with the contents or ruminating further on ‘what it means’. If a dream is experienced through a ‘perspective’ that one inhabits (whether through their own/someone/something/somewhere else), in what sense is the dream not their own? While self-identification with dream content may be counter-productive to the pragmatist, in what sense can we write it off as mental cinema? How can what occurs in our dreams have nothing to do with us? Whether the dreamer experiences depersonalization or an out-of-body state, the dream’s re-telling will always be located in the person who dreamed it. To insist on one’s ownership of their dream is not to claim that its contents hold hidden meanings or allegories. It is to affirm an ethic of remembering, because it is our relationship to dreams that ‘say something’ about us. The dream speaks, but it is our relation to its form that matters.
Unlike waking life, dreams may afford us unusually heightened subjective states that we embody — we might feel insatiated, volatile, uninhibited, or removed. This positions us to act and perceive in ways we wouldn’t otherwise. These experiences might contribute to feelings of shame, rage, horror, or that which exceeds explanation. How did we find ourselves here? Why did this happen to me?
Dreams as Split Subjectivity
They stage parts of the self that are disavowed, externalized, or observed at a distance
The dream-image is both me and not-me — revealing internal division
Responses to Dream Content as Self-Theorization
Our affective reactions (dread, shame, fascination, indifference) index how we conceive of ourselves
They expose how much the subject relies on distance, denial, or framing to relate to its own unconscious
Dreams as Sites of Structural Breakdown
Dreams lack narrative coherence, causality, and symbolic stability
They stage a breakdown in language, logic, and temporal sequencing — akin to the Real
Sublimation as Distance from Nightmare
Sublimation (à la Kant’s sublime) involves retrospective framing of overwhelming affect
A nightmare may become “sublime” only after the fact, through thought, form, or aestheticization
This distance can result in apathy, detachment, or contemplative safety
Shattering of the Sublimating Screen
What happens when this reflective distance fails?
Viewer is returned to raw affect, unframed horror, or psychic collapse
Raises questions about the limits of aesthetic form and the fragility of psychic safeguards