The dream thieves

Being a chronic insomniac, I only got an estimated two hours of sleep last night.  But this was enough for me to enjoy a couple of vivid, and beautiful, dreams.  I have always cherished my dreams and I’ve even been known to write some of them down.
Everybody dreams, though not everybody remembers their dreams and not everybody even remembers that they dream.  But what goes into our dreams?  For those who watch television or movies, there is little doubt that the powerful imagery of those media impacts their dreams.  It is likely that the dreams of those who watch television regularly are heavily contaminated by television imagery, symbolism, values and personalities.  Television celebrities become part of the mind of the dreamer and, even if the celebrities do not appear in their real-life faces and real-life names, they are likely there symbolically.  Here is a question to ponder:  How much time does a regular television watcher spend focusing on his favorite actors and actresses – compared to how much time he spends focusing on his own parents or siblings?  This in mind, we should ask:  Which ones is he more likely to dream about?
Perhaps I am not being fair in describing the dreams of consumers of television and movies as “not their own”.  After all, each one of us is subject to a variety of life experiences and inputs.  Who is to say that television and movie input is less legitimate than the input from our work, our vacations or our family contacts?  My answer is that, unlike those other experiences, television and movies are carefully engineered.  They are artificial.  They are the Twinkies of our life experiences while our real-life experiences are our meat and potatoes (or vegetables and tofu if you are vegetarian).  The experiences we get through television and movies is pre-packaged for us.  Its ingredients are carefully formulated and, as most of us already know, there are subliminal messages hidden within such entertainment.  Those messages are seldom wholesome or truthful.
We get another angle on this from Anthony Megna on Helium.com:

Movies have their place, and there is nothing like a good movie. But realize that it is anothers’ view. Not yours. You don’t really have the power to daydream with a movie. It happens too fast on anothers’ time table. All those images speeding by and your brain trying to make sense of the images. With reading, you can stop and ponder. You can go back and reread a passage. You can build your own fantasy out of the raw material in the book. There is no substitute for reading.

When we read books, even fiction, our minds must create the imagery so the fantasy – and the dreams that follow – are the fruits of our own minds more so than had we watched a movie instead.
Our inner mind is a great resource.  Buried beneath layer upon layer of the refuse from our mundane lives, it becomes more and more difficult to tap into as we progress through adulthood.  For those of us fortunate enough to remember our dreams, their purity should be a priority.  Ignorant and free of the pop culture spread by television and movies, I can ask myself, upon awakening, “what is my inner mind trying to tell me?”  There is little need to worry that, instead of my inner mind, it is instead an impostor interloping from the land of the unclean.

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11 Responses to The dream thieves

  1. portland1realist says:

    Yes, it’s terrible dreaming about Anderson Cooper or Bill O’Reilly. Haha!
    I only remember bad dreams. Last week I had a dream my wife was shot by black gang-bangers. I watch a good bit of T.V. and movies, but I seem to dream about what is on my mind much more than that.
    “It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia” is so funny. You are missing out my friend!

  2. When people relied on radio more than tv their minds had to create the images too

  3. How do you pronounce “Japheth”?
    Merriam Webster says something like “jay feth”, but I’m skeptical.
    Last night I dreamed that my wife and I stayed in a bed & breakfast in a complex of B&Bs looking all alike. I lost her and all my stuff. I asked everyone in several B&Bs if they knew where she was and no one knew, but they were all very nice to me.
    ???

  4. countenance says:

    I had a couple of recurring dreams when I was younger. The first one involved walking in a deciduous forest environment, then the trees suddenly giving way to open grass, with a notch open space surrounded by trees on either side, which stopped in the distance for more green space. As I’m standing in this open space “lob,” an adult male lion comes up to me and bites my hand. No pain, no hand severance. The dream ends.
    The other one was of a friend and I in the back yard of the house where I lived at the time. Someone comes up to me and tells me I’ve won a trip to Hawaii, but the catch was I had to travel there on a paper airplane, and just as I hear him say those words, the paper airplane, in the shape of a standard passenger jet, flies overhead at an altitude that a standard passenger jet would, and makes the kind of noise it would. But it was made out of paper.

  5. Olive says:

    You are what you eat. What you feed upon on a regular basis gets into you, and you eventually are influenced by it and become it and pass it on to your children. Be careful what you allow inside.

  6. Olive says:

    I was thinking of the way TV forms people and gets into you (like food). Watching TV is passive, and most people’s minds are in a passive, receptive state when they watch. Perfect for programming and displacing the “you” inside with its own culture and agenda.
    Our inner mind is a great resource. Buried beneath layer upon layer of the refuse from our mundane lives, it becomes more and more difficult to tap into as we progress through adulthood.
    The Child gets deluged with layers of culture from very young. He gets lost, smothered. Culture replaces common sense. Culture replaces the Child, the “inner mind.” The child depends on the adults around him; he is in a very passive, receptive position, like a sponge. He is made to doubt his observations and accepts excuses as explanations. He ceases to think for himself, to form his own self. His Voice gets lost among all the other voices in his head that he has taken in.
    Ignorant and free of the pop culture spread by television and movies, I can ask myself, upon awakening, “what is my inner mind trying to tell me?” There is little need to worry that, instead of my inner mind, it is instead an impostor interloping from the land of the unclean.
    “An imposter interloping from the land of the unclean.” The Unholy usurping the place of the Holy within. I don’t want to taint the resource I have within any more than it already has been. It’s hard enough trying to find it again, to hear it again, I don’t want to add to the problem by taking in too much “junk food” … the “twinkies” of TV instead of the “meat and potatoes” of my own experiences, observations and thoughts. My Voice instead of a media voice-over.

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