Rita ’s Reviews > The Anatomy of Dreams > Status Update

“I’m a researcher. […] We’re investigating mystery—and doesn’t poetry do the same thing?”
“It’s different. Poets question mysteries: [...] they stand witness but they don’t necessarily try to solve them. What you’re doing is much more dangerous. You’re trying to put a face to the subconscious—something that should, in my opinion, remain faceless. You’re dragging it out of its cave, shining a flashlight in its eyes.”

“Negative capability?”
“‘When man is capable of being in uncertainties. Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’ […] Reading, writing—engaging in this kind of negative capability—I don’t think it’s an escape. I mean to argue that the real world, our world, is negative capability. Not knowing is the only reality, and our escape is the unreality of knowledge.”

And yet you did feel the threat of the outcomes that were not realized; indeed, you seemed to feel that threat more acutely than you did any sense of relief that the apple [...] sailed right over your head. I believe that these potential experiences are logged in the brain along with the actual one, that [...] an imagined nonevent [...] has as much cognitive power as the actual event.

At the moment of action, an infinite array of possibilities are conceived in the mind—alternate but parallel psychological universes, each with its own set of outcomes and implications. Only one of these possibilities will be actualized. But what happens to the rest? If they folded neatly into submission, [...] You would have felt no anxious residue, no fear or anger, when the apple was no longer a threat.

Maybe the dreams themselves aren’t dangerous. Maybe what’s dangerous is putting people in contact with them.

Couldn’t what begins as an exercise in self-knowledge actually reveal our darkest impulses? […] Once we experience our dreams—not via recollection, but right there in the moment—how long is it before we start to believe that this is who we really are, what we really want, how we really feel? When does one’s dream consciousness become their consciousness, I mean?

The brain is like an excellent fiction writer: every part of a dream is laden with meaning that can be unlocked, analyzed, and understood. We hide our greatest hopes there, our deepest fears. And when we learn to read our dreams, so to speak—not retrospectively, when we wake up, but right there in the moment—we’re reading the story of who we really are.