Dreaming

[Bartholomew]

I aim to discuss the specific aspect of dreams that deals with the singularity of the human experience. Dreaming is something that we all do, regardless of how often each one of us can remember after we awake. What strikes me as fascinating is that we all experience the same sort of tricks and moods in our dreams. For example, we can attribute an arbitrary object (say, a pencil) in a dream with an extremely dreadful characteristic that makes us immensely afraid of that pencil, but upon returning to reality, we would never view a pencil as frightening. This attribution error, as well as many other frequent characteristics of dreams are shared by us all, despite the fact that dreaming is one of the most singular and isolated human experiences imaginable (literally no contact to any other humans in your mind).

Does this make you feel as though we're all fundamentally the same, or at least connected in a way that you otherwise wouldn't have realized? I just find this amazing, though I don't know what to make of it just yet. I realized this after watching Mulholland Dr. and discussing the film with a friend who had experienced the same exact types of dreams that the movie conjured as well as me.