It's the dead of night. In the darkness, my breath starts speeding up. My heart gallops, and so do my eyes, rapidly jerking in any direction.

The Death Museum

I suddenly find myself in a town I don't know, walking by a huge baroque building, imposing and somehow sinister. A statue of a man guards the entrance. Something about him is awkward. I think it's his body: balloon-shaped, with a big head and torso, but small legs. On the other side of the entrance, a banner hangs from the wall, showing a mustached man suspiciously displacing the top of the coffin he's lying in to look to his left. The copy says "DEATH MUSEUM." I feel eyes on me. I turn slightly and realize that the huge statue is following me with its gaze. Thank goodness I'm no longer alone: two of my friends have arrived from a side street, but for some reason, I don't understand, instead of running away, they're determined to visit that museum. Reluctantly, I follow them into the atrium of the building and, without realizing it, we take different paths again. I start to climb the sumptuous stone steps in front of me, and within a few seconds, the stone guardian of the building – who had been following us with his eyes – takes flight and chases me. I'm scared to death, but instead of using my residual adrenaline to take cover, I pause and ask him the way to the ticket office. He points me to a table where no one was seated, and he himself flies behind the desk, deflating like a balloon and acquiring the appearance of a distinguished butler. At this moment, my friends – who had taken the elevator – arrive at the ticket office as well, and we buy a guided tour of the museum. As soon as the visit begins, I notice that our butler-guide acts suspiciously behind our backs. For instance, to visit the first room, we had to take off our shoes. As I'm done and go back to get mine, I see him sprinkling my flip-flops with a yellow, anesthetizing powder, the same one that - as I read in the explanatory posters inside the room - could be used to cut off a part of someone's body without them noticing it. Also, I realize he's using some sticky coal cubes to prevent other visitors from escaping the museum by gluing them where they are. Nonetheless, my friends and I continue the visit and reach a majestic study room, with grand pianos instead of tables and incredibly large and bright windows. From one of them, I see the butler-guide in his statue guise, flying and carrying with it a series of balconies. I'm astonished and start thinking the statue might be some sort of ghost trying to capture and kill people to expose in its museum. Our next stop is in the dining room. We sit to eat our packed lunch, when, all of a sudden, rivulets of water start streaming from the walls. And that’s when my alarm finally brings me back to the real world.

What are dreams?

What you’ve just read could be the plot of a movie, but it was just the plot of one of my latest dreams, from which I woke up with a resounding question in my mind: “What the hell?”

Yeah. What was that exactly? I’ve never been to a death museum, and I’ve never thought of visiting one. I didn’t recognize the building nor the town I was in, and my friends and I acted against our usual behavior. They’d have never ached for visiting such a museum, and I’d have probably fainted if a stone statue chased me in real life. Though, everything looked and felt so real, that my body really experienced the highs and lows of this story from the theatre of the absurd. These kinds of dreams, the strangest and most hallucinogenic, are the result of brain activity during the REM phase of sleep, the time when our muscles are almost paralyzed, while our eyes move extremely fast, accompanied by increasing heartbeats, blood pressure, and breathing. Going to sleep is therefore like going on an adventure because while our body relaxes and rests, our brain doesn't stop working. Various studies have in fact shown that, although during the first three phases of sleep, brain waves also slow down, once the last phase (REM phase) is reached, they begin to intensify, transporting myriads of information from short-term to long-term memory, moving not only information recorded consciously but also fishing from the well of the unconscious. It is as if the brain improvised itself as a filmmaker and started editing clips from various hard disks within the memory, projecting stories and images that can leave us speechless when we wake up. But why does the brain do all this work?

Why do we dream?

One of the reasons why we dream is the one we already mentioned: to consolidate what we learn, transferring information from short-term to long-term memory, supporting and recording waking consciousness. Similarly, we also dream in order to forget, that is, to cleanse our brain of an avalanche of information that is not useful and that – if kept – would end up disrupting the necessary thinking we need to do while we're awake. But dreamwork is not just a matter of memory management. As Freudian psychology argues, we dream to fulfill our wishes, to realize the desires and thoughts that in our real life we repress for the most varied reasons. Think of dreaming of getting a position you’d been longing for, or of sleeping with the man or woman you most desire. And then we dream to rehearse, to practice our fight or flight instincts, for instance, running from a zombie chasing us in the woods or preparing ourselves for the worst-case scenario in which a difficult situation we are experiencing might unfold. We also dream to heal because reviewing traumatic events in our dreams grants us a clearer, less stressful perspective to process the traumas in a healthy way. And we dream to solve problems regardless of the rules of conventional logic. While we sleep, our mind is free to create endless scenarios to help us grasp problems and formulate solutions that we might not consider while we are awake. Because of that, dreams are a powerful source of creativity, providing us with that brilliant solution we needed to enhance our project or with an insight that might turn our point of view on reality upside down. Just to mention a couple of examples, the chemist August Kekulé discovered the structure of the benzene molecule in a dream, and the writer Robert Louis Stevenson was revealed his long-awaited plot for a story about the duality of the human soul dreaming about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Dreams are thus a side-effect of brain activity during sleep, which is not only fundamental but also often ingenious. However, there is also a very important function that we have not yet mentioned, but which has been the focus of interest in dreams since antiquity. Dreams can reveal aspects and information about us that we did not think we knew and that could help us to improve our daily lives.

What do our dreams say about us?

As far back as the third millennium BC, in Mesopotamia, some kings must have woken up in the throes of disorientation after dreaming of who knows what strange adventures, wondering about the meaning of the bizarre story their brain had just invented during their sleep. In fact, several wax tablets were found on which Mesopotamian kings’ dream activity had been recorded. And in Egypt, people had taken it a step further by breaking down the recorded dreams into lists of recurring stories and themes, with their meanings attached. What incredible messages from the gods or spirits dreams represented to ancient civilizations. But with the arrival of Freud - an Austrian neurologist and psychoanalyst - dreams began to be studied under new lenses, those of psychoanalysis, which disproved the hypothesis of the random nature of dreams, highlighting instead the connection that dreams have with the thoughts and problems of conscious life. Freud came to these conclusions based on certain neurological studies, according to which neurotic symptoms, apparently senseless, would be linked to some conscious experience. These symptoms, according to the neurologist, were areas detached from the conscious mind, but capable of appearing on the surface at different times and under different conditions, including, for example, in dreams. And it is precisely by telling other people our dreams – emphasizing some aspects and omitting others – that we can get to the unconscious roots of our disorders, fears, and complexes. Who knows what Freud would have said if he could have analyzed my dream about the Museum of Death. Surely, he would have started out in search of the symbols around which the story evolved, which are the true road to the unconscious and to the discovery of the hidden meaning of the images I dreamt about. He would probably also have asked me to start making free associations in relation to each element, letting me speak freely in relation to the stone statue, the museum of death, my friends, and my own behavior, channeling me into a flow that would bring to the surface so much information that I would never have thought could be connected to that absurd dream. Penetrating each symbol to unearth its latent content, I think he would also have somehow managed to reduce it all to some repressed sexual desire because, as his colleague Jung also recognized, his theory was that every symbol was the masking of a repressed feeling. Often, of a desire deemed unacceptable by a certain part of us which, therefore, would censor it and disguise it as a statue, museum, anesthetizing yellow powder or little sticky coal cube. And since it is possible to find in every dream impression of the previous days, elements that have passed unnoticed by our consciousness and impressions derived directly from the reservoir of our earliest childhood, he would have come to find some unresolved Oedipus complex, some destructive or aggressive tendency, or some irrepressible libidinal drives.

Actually, there are indeed archetypal meanings that certain symbols represent. For instance:

Dreaming of flying means to be ambitious and successful, but also wanting to go far away, as far away as possible from everyday problems.
Dreaming of falling, on the other hand, is connected to a strong sense of helplessness, stress, anxiety, tiredness. It could be dictated by moments of change and fear, thus linked to negative feelings of insecurity and instability.
Dreaming of getting lost in a crowd may symbolize the fear of not being recognized, or of being overwhelmed by others, or the desire to escape from social pressure to find one's own way.
Dreaming that you are being chased by someone may mean that there is somebody trying to bully you, abusing their authority and influence, even for illicit purposes. Or that there are work problems that you cannot manage and that torment your mind.

If then one of these dreams or any other pattern becomes recurrent, it is either an attempt by our unconscious to compensate for some defect of the dreamer towards life, or it is the result of a traumatizing event that has left behind a specific prejudice. And, in its recurrence, the dream tries to make us open our eyes wide, to put two and two together and realize that something is wrong. Nonetheless, as Jung – a Swiss psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, anthropologist, and philosopher – stated, every dream must be interpreted in the light of the individual dreamer, looking for the meaning of a symbol from the perspective of his experience, sensitivity, and particularities. I have no idea what Jung might have said about my “The Museum of Death” dream, but I tried to apply his approach in another situation that I’m going to share with you. I dreamt for a couple of months, almost every day, of cramped bathrooms, with blue neon lights, with ridiculous doors (they covered an area of a few centimeters, leaving everything visible from the outside) or even with toilets placed next to each other, at the end of dark and dusty corridors, in which I felt deeply uncomfortable. This was during a transitional phase in my life, at the beginning of a new university experience, with new people, in a new city and new roommates, with a strong need to let go of past experiences, and also with the difficulty of adapting to a new context, for fear of not being accepted as I was. Combining the conventional meaning of dreaming about toilets to the context I was living in, I realized I was pushing myself out of my comfort zone in the wrong way. And realizing it allowed me to say yes to the right experiences, managing to live two of the best years of my life. Since then, I have no longer dreamt of common, cramped, and scary bathrooms.,

Believing in our dreams

This means, as Jung put it, that the messages of the unconscious are more important than we are used to believe: in our conscious life we are subjected to all kinds of influences – social, professional, familiar – and these lead us to adopt attitudes that are not our own and that, not fitting our personality, create a crack between us, our values, and our deepest self. We may be more or less aware of these effects, but our consciousness remains disturbed, with no possibility of defense. It is then that dreams come into action, with their function of restoring the normal psychic balance, compensating for personality deficiencies, warning us against the dangers of our behavior. By paying attention to what we dream about, to the frequency and recurrence of certain themes and symbols, and to the feelings we experience in dreaming and recounting them, we may come to discover that we are trying to resolve a difficult situation in the wrong way, or that the situation seems difficult only because we are looking at it from the least suitable point of view. So, let us not take our dreams for granted and learn to remember them, write them down, tell them, and interpret them. They will give us solutions and new perspectives that we didn't know we needed, but which are exactly what will improve our lives.

Dreamland

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