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My guess is that if we could count up all the people in our culture on a given day that mention the interpretation of dreams, we could then divide that number by five and get a good idea about the number of differing theories about dream interpretation.  Ten thousand people?  Two thousand versions.  A hundred thousand people?  Twenty thousand interpretations.

I have often wondered if aging changes how people dream.  When I reached the age of about 45, my dreaming seemed to stop completely as if I had suddenly become a different person.  Gone were the vivid Technicolor scenes of flowing activity.  Gone were the presentations of insight in fairy tale formats.  Gone were my dreams.

Last night the wind came.  It tore around the house, picking up anything not tied or nailed down and throwing them against the walls of the house, battering my mind in sleep with its roaring.  Rain pounded on the tin roof above my bed, an ever welcome sound in this high desert, but strange in its silence as both the water pouring out of the sky and its sister wind stopped together as soon as the first faint light of dawn began to creep over our world from the eastern horizon.

It is so silent now it almost feels like the world on the other side of the walls of my house has disappeared.  It is this same kind of silence that greets me when I rise from my bed in the morning, leaving behind me the rattling noise of my sleep.  I woke many times last night because of the storm, and each time I did a part of me thought, “Oh, darn it!  I am not dreaming, I’m thinking!”

There were even times when my eyes opened into the darkness that I found myself in the middle of writing while I was sleeping.  Whole paragraphs of words greeted me just at that threshold between sleep and waking.  One time I knew the topic of my epistle that had been taking place behind the veil was profoundly sociological.   Patterns of human thought, instantly collapsed into a single awareness as I opened my eyes, seemed to contain the wishes for wisdom that follow human generations for thousands and thousands of years.

I gave up on sleeping at 4:30 this morning, and wandered into my kitchen to fix myself some coffee.  At that time the storm was still surrounding my house.  Now it has gone as if it had never existed, just like the words of my dreams.

What has changed in my brain that now I am forced to sleep with a mind full of words instead of images?  Where are the living, breathing connections within me?  They have been replaced with this dry, sterile flat landscape of words.  I resent this.  I miss my dreams.

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As a member of the select group of people who today might wake up wondering about a dream they had last night (even though I doubt I officially even had one), I can join in the medley of dream interpretations by offering what was taught to me about ‘working with dreams’ when I was in art therapy graduate school.

“Dreams are images,” by long white-bearded professor would chant in front of the class.  “They are no different than the images painted on canvas or drawn with pencil on pages of white paper.  Stick with the image,” he would repeat time after time.  “Stick with the image.  It will always tell you what it wants you to know if you simply learn how to let it.”

Besides these sparse words there is one other point I can remember now twenty years later.  “Look for the places in the image where something is changing.  It is in those places that the life force within the image is moving.”

We were taught to find within an image exactly what was there.  Nothing more.  Nothing less.  Within a dream’s verbal telling the change points will always appear in such words as “suddenly” and “but” and “but then” and “if.”  At these points a new perspective appears.  Something different happens.  One thing turns into another.  We were taught to understand that no matter how convoluted and complex dreams might appear, they can always be understood in their essence by the movement of their changes.

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The morning’s slow shift from pitch blackness to daylight doesn’t seem to be captured correctly in the word ‘dawn’ to me like the evening shift can be transcribed into ‘twilight’.  There is just as much mystery to me in this gradual shift happening outside of my windows right now as I wait for what’s missing – the sound of today’s first bird call.  Where are the birds?  Are they frightened, soaked and in hiding?

“Call to me, little ones.  Let me know you are out there.  The sound of your voices will comfort me.  You let me know every day I wake up into the same world I was in last night when I tried to sleep, restlessly, dreamlessly and verbal.  This silent dray world is eerie and everything seems out of place.”

I wait for this half-light transition to complete itself.  Transitions, the stuff all life is made out of.

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I did not intend to write about dreaming this morning.  I intended to write about laughter.  What has happened is that I am stuck in between these two topics at the point where they are connected.  That point is about transitions and insight.  (I am glad.  I hear a small bird’s first chirping outside my kitchen window.  I am home now.  I am awake as the world outside wakes along with me.)

I tried earlier to find a book on my shelves I could read this morning to carry me in time across that great divide between darkness and daylight, but several pages of several books left me feeling the same.  Too many harsh words with edges that left grit between my teeth.  Too few words in each sentence so that as I tried to move my eyes across lines on the page I kept being hit in the face with period after period.  “Just let me read,” my word-dream tired brain bellowed at me.  “I just want to flow with a thought, not be pulled up short each time I barely get going!”

So I ended up simply back again with Dr. Dacher Keltner’s 2009 book, Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life, picking up where I left off in my reading several days ago, before I got sidetracked by my sadness and minor sickness.

I found this morning that Keltner headed the next section of his chapter on laughter “The Cooperation Switch.”  After reading this section, my mind wants to rename it “The Transition-Insight Switch.”  He describes how researchers have discovered that every time we laugh our nervous system responds by relaxing itself.  Keltner describes how as this pause in our ongoing experience happens, we benefit from an instant of opportunity for discovering something new and different about any situation we might be contending with.

Laugher, as the prosocial specialized sound mix it is, in between the ranges in our vocal chords that we use for talking, connects us not only to others around us, but also to our own self.  Laughter represents a loosening of our grip on what we consider to be our usual reality, and makes room for explorations into ‘something different’.

Keltner describes how an infant-child’s capacity for laugher is integrated with the capacity for developing speech and thought.  He writes about the stages of young childhood a child passes through as it pretends one thing is something else.  A bathtub filled with water IS an ocean.  A teaspoon IS a magic wand.  A child bobbing up and down wildly on a bed IS flying.  Children learn about themselves as they transition into the larger world by using pretense in play.

This critical play stage of infant-child development is supposed to involve laugher.  I have written previously about how I don’t believe my mother ever transitioned successfully through this process.  The patterns of human development that Keltner describes are supposed to happen in the same way those nighttime transitions turn into day.

Long before the first rays of the sun outlined the high edges of the clouds to differentiate them from the mountaintops I could then see outside my kitchen window, I knew the daylight was coming because of the chirping of the birds.  When laugher and happiness are missing for a child during this critical developmental stage of development, it is possible that the borderline between night and day in a child’s developing mind is never crossed completely.  The presence of infant-child laugher is as sure a signal of transition as is the chirping of a morning’s first bird.

Laughter does not make a child grow up any more than a chirping bird makes the sun come up.  Yet while it would take a drastic force beyond my imagination to change the natural patterns of a daybreak, I can imagine forces that change a young child’s world so much that laughter ceases to be a part of it.  Such was the early world of my mother.

Keltner writes about childhood laugher, play and the individual evolution of the human mind as he describes a transitional process across the ‘border land’ of development my mother never completed successfully:

“These forms of pretense emerge in systematic fashion at around eighteen months of age.  They are all systematically accompanied by laughter.  And they lead the child to develop the ability to use words to refer to multiple objects.  As children free themselves from one-to-one relations between words and objects, they learn that words have multiple meanings.  They also learn that objects can be many things – a banana can be a banana, a phone, an ogre’s nose, or a boy’s penis (when the parents aren’t’ around).

“In the freedom of pretend play, children learn that there are multiple p0erspectives upon objects, actions, and identities.  The child moves out of the egocentrism of his or her own mind and learns that the beliefs and representations of other minds most certainly differ from one’s own.  And it is laughter that transports children to this platform of understanding and epistemological insight.

“Laughter is a portal to the world of pretense, play, and the imagination; it is an invitation to a nonliteral world where the truths of identities, objects, and relations are momentarily suspended, and alternatives are willingly entertained.  Those hours of pretend play – peek-a-boo games, monsters and princesses, the ogre under the bridge, astronauts – are the gateway to empathy and moral imagination.”  (pages 137-138)

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Keltner has developed a theory about laughter:

“In the observation that laugher accompanies the child’s capacity to pretend, to participate in alternatives to the realities referred to in sincere communication, we arrive at a hypothesis about laugher.  Let’s call this hypothesis the laughter as vacation hypothesis.

“The word “vacation” traces its linguistic history back to the Latin vacare, which means to be “empty, free, or at leisure” and is defined as a formal suspension of activity or duty.  The laugh, then, signals the suspension of formal, sincere meaning.  It points to a layer of interaction where alternatives to assumed truths are possible, where identities are lighthearted and nonserious.  When people laugh, they are taking a momentary vacation from the more sincere claims and implications of their actions.

“A special realm of sound is reserved for laughs, and it is an ancient one that predates language, represented in old regions of the nervous system – the brain stem – which also regulates breathing.  This acoustic space reserved for laughs triggers laughter and pleasure in others [through the actions of our mirror neurons], and designates, like the confines of a circus or theater, a social realm for acts of pretense and imagination.  In the pretend play of young children, laugher enables playful routines that allow them to have alternative perspectives on the world they are facing.  Laugher is a ticket to the world of pretense, it is a two- to three-second vacation from the encumbrances, burdens, and gravity of the world of literal truths and sincere commitments.”  (pages 138-139)

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Steps to the making of a regular day happen without human influence.  Not so the making of a human being.  The book, Ghosts from the Nursery: Tracing the Roots of Violence by Robin Karr-Morse, Meredith S. Wiley, and Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, applies to my mother.  Playing alone and isolated with her delicately painted china dolls, my mother became a ghost of a child.  As my sister puts it, our mother became a Toymaster, not a mother, not a whole person.  My mother’s mind never transitioned out of the imaginary world of her early childhood.

Everyone in my mother’s world, including her, was a pretend doll playing a pretend part in a pretend drama on a pretend stage.  Everything she ever did was a pretense and she never even knew it.  She was a ghostly shadow of the woman she could have become because she never completed the transition across that borderline between what is real and what is not.

What was missing at the beginning of my mother’s life – the prosocial genuine experience of laughter – was also absent in the middle and at the end.  My mother lived a nightmare she never woke up from until the day she died.  It was on the darkest side of her twilight borderline, where she never fully consciously woke up out of her own abused and neglected child mind, that I shared the misery of my childhood with her.

In my mother’s nightmare the darkness could never transform  itself into the light of day.

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