Our initial intention for inquiring about the dreams of our peers was to explore the underlying details of their subconscious. This was a unique opportunity to analyze the similarities we share that normally go unspoken, as we are not often encouraged in our everyday lives to discuss our dreams. Further, events that occur in our everyday realities that we do not discuss among others tend to find their way into our dreams and deeper thoughts.
There was a very distinct line between those who did and those who did not care to find a deeper meaning within their dreams. Some students, whether they had a silly or scary dream, were interested in what their dreams meant. Often it was the dreamers with the most seemingly normal or mundane content that were analyzed. Others firmly believed that their dreams did not hold any significance within their lives.
All of the dreams featured a surprisingly recurring melancholic element. Even the dreams that had comedic parts would then delve into a somber reflection on the current life or situation the writer was living in. Perhaps it was due to the time of year that the students were asked to record their dreams that these melancholic elements appeared. Midterm season is often a stressful time of year, along with the weather changing into darker and colder days as we enter the winter season.
When read in its entirety, this collection of dreams appears to make sense and its intention seems obvious. They build from mundane, calm dreams, to a climax of the more abstract, serious, and eerie. But in the midst of reading these dreams, they seem fragmented, surprising, and obscure. The goal was to recreate the sensation of dreaming for the reader, with the entries appearing more abstract in the moment but coming together once the reader takes a step back from the material. By emulating the structure of a dream, we were hoping to produce the sensation in readers of waking up in the midst of dreaming, leaving the reader confused and disoriented as they re-immerse themselves in their everyday.
Similar to Mass Observation, these diaries serve as a collection of reflections on the idealized shared experience that is university, similar to the coronation. The undergraduate experience is designed and advertised as an experience that is meant to form a community of students, and there is a prescribed idea of who a university student is that dictated by society: their likes, interests, and feelings about school. But, like Mass Observation, this collection of entries debunks this ideal by displaying the underlying sadness and stress that many students subconsciously feel when at school, and the ways in which this stress haunts their subconscious. The students understand everything individually, even when they participate in the same events or share similar experiences they are affected in different ways.
The ideas presented in these diaries struggle between the desires for isolation, privacy and the immersion into a collective of other humans. Dreaming is a solely isolated activity, however the desire for either privacy or a collective was prevalent. Sometimes the dreams included people whom they knew personally, and it was a medium through which they were able to explore their relationships and interact with them outside of their waking lives. Although physically separated from people while sleeping, the dreams featured, if not specific members from the dreamer’s social circle, then their thoughts and opinions on it were present.
(12) The first thought I had this morning is: “whoa its October twelfth, what the hell did I dream about?” I have been writing my dreams down for the past 2 weeks, and this morning had to be the morning when I didn’t remember my dream. At least I woke up happy. But the fact that I didn’t have a single memory of my unconscious mind in the last 7-8 hours pissed me off. I had prepared myself to remember my dreams, and it just flopped this morning. So instead on focusing on the fact that I forgot my dream, I tried to focus on positive things and remembered that I had all day to try and remember bits of my dream. A part of it did come back about 30 minutes later. This little bit of my dream was about a baggie of cocaine. A small little Ziploc bag as big as my thumb half full of cocaine. Yeah. Cocaine. The more I thought about it, the more the dream came back in my head and the more I was asking myself why I woke up so happy this morning. It actually started to stress me because I remembered that I had lost a baggie of cocaine somewhere and had no clue where it was. In my dream my dad had just found it. I don’t know where we were, I just remember his “what the fuck is that?” face showing the half full cocaine baggie. At least the bag was empty in real life.
(11) The powder was simply fluffy and in abundance, an empty white field right below me. I was standing atop a cliff beside a small alpine evergreen to my left, and my best mate in the snow down below. I took off my bindings, felt the cold on my cheeks and my breath in the air, and walked back some meters. I strapped my feet onto my board, stood up, dropped in, and flew over the cliff and right onto my feet I began to surf. Ding! A fork has fallen in the kitchen and I am not snowboarding but in bed – ding! “Where is Curt?” The morning light glares off my ski goggles hung up above my window, my mittens dangling beside them on a hook – outside there is no snow, it is autumn. For a few moments while my eyes slowly adjust to the morning light, I remembered some of the ski lines I had last winter – I turned around in bed, looked at my snowboard, and felt the quick rush of a heel slash in the snow. I must admit, I love to dream of the mountains. Nightly I am left there alone, somewhere on a ridge, in a crack on a mountain’s face, skiing in trees, or simply looking up. While I find myself in the fresh air, I am humbled by the presence of a human – a beating heart I share current experience, not simply images of the past. As I begin to smell the coffee coming from the kitchen and sit up in my bed, a moment of déjà-vu arises. I am sitting up in the van looking out of my small window at Sproatt Mountain; perhaps tonight I may find myself dreaming of I sleeping in the van – out there, but over here.
(15) I can remember what I heard. Music was constantly playing in my mind. I couldn’t switch it off. It seemed like the songs embedded into me. I remember feeling that sense of uselessness because I couldn’t control what was happening. I wanted to control the sounds in my dream, so it felt like I was awake. I listen to a lot of world music even though I don’t understand the languages. Since I’m not fluent in Tamil or don’t speak any Hindi or Korean, my mind was able to remember the exact words and the tunes of the songs. In my dream, music was being played in my mind like how I listen to songs on the radio or on YouTube. I remember thinking, “How can I know the exact words of these songs and be able to recite them in my mind, but when I speak, why can’t I actually pronounce these words with my own mouth?”
I remember nothing visual from my dream. What I can say is that a single image immediately popped up when I woke up from my slumber. An image of myself holding my camera by my waist, a Canon EOS 700D, and standing in the living room of my university residence. I wore blue jeans, a blue and black patterned vest top, with floral brown flip-flops and my hair was tied up in a bun. It looked like I was in the middle of something important, like I was dressed up for something that required attention. I was leaning back slightly with an exasperated expression and staring at something on the floor, but it was not from my point of view – I was looking at myself as if I was another person. I seemed tired. I looked dissatisfied at whatever I was staring at. I seemed stressed out and unhappy with whatever happened. I remember feeling that I needed something to be perfect and that I must achieve perfection.
The second image was of myself overlooking several objects scattered about on the carpet, like an over-the-shoulder shot. The objects included oranges, utensils, t-shirts, a washing-up liquid bottle, a laptop, and British, American, and Canadian coins. The objects were arranged in a rectangle and ordered in the colours of a rainbow, beginning with pink, then red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple. In the background, there were purple-cushioned sofas around the room and a window. I cannot remember if the blue curtains were closed or not.
It wasn’t like a scene where I physically moved, like a film scene, but they were more like photographic shots, where I was captured in a moment. It turned out that somehow in my unconscious I was planning my to-do list. I needed to take photographs for an assignment the next day and one of the images was the collection of everyday items on the carpet that were arranged in the colours of the rainbow. I was exploring the theme of colours and rainbows. Even in my dreams, I am thinking about work, and want to finish off these tasks as soon as possible. I can’t seem to get a break from work. It’s always on my mind. I tend to put too much effort into something because I want to achieve perfection. This explains why I was overlooking the objects, appearing to be dissatisfied as I was holding the camera by my waist.
(5) The part of my dream from last night that I could remember was about me rearranging and painting furniture in my room. However, this wasn’t my room back home or the dorm room that I stay in currently, although it resembled my dorm room more than my room at home. It was a room with large, very basic, boxy, wooden furniture. There was a piece of string or tape, I can’t exactly remember which it was, going from a short dresser in one corner of the room to a small night table in the other corner, so the string/tape blocked you from walking around the room much. In the dream, a stranger asked me why I had the string, and I replied, “It’s so I know that I’m done painting that piece.” I never actually painted in the dream though. I woke up feeling kind of confused as it was a very mundane event but after thinking about it, it makes more sense. I’m in a room that I can’t really customize, make my own, so the dream may have been conveying my desire to express myself more through my room. Or maybe it’s bigger than that and applies to an inner desire to be more expressive and creative in real life. I remember there being a lot of beiges and browns in the room in my dream, which resembles my actual dorm room. I don’t necessarily like those colors—they’re boring to me. Now, when I look at the dull colours in my room, I feel uninspired.
(9) I am a little unsure what to write for this entry since most of the time, I do not remember my dreams, and I do not remember what I dreamt about last night. Perhaps this is because I am a deep sleeper, and it is not very often that I wake up during the night. There are some mornings where I wake and am able to remember what I dreamt about, but this does not happen regularly, and when it does happen, it is often just a snippet or two, not a full storyline. For instance, I did have a dream one night last week where my roommates and I were at a park somewhere and then we were driving home and my roommate was driving which I was very confused about because he does not have a driver’s license. I feel like most of the dreams I remember consist of familiar people, although the place is often unfamiliar, just as it was in this dream from last week.
(17) So, preamble: when I was a frosh leader this year, one of the challenges my froshie was given was to eat an entire head of cabbage in 15 minutes. As a leader, I am supposed to help the froshie complete any challenge that they aren’t comfortable with. Fast forward, I found myself eating an entire head of cabbage that night. I think that I was subconsciously scarred by this cabbage eating experience, because this morning I jolted awake from a dream where I was deathly allergic to cabbage and had mistaken it for lettuce. My roommates and I were in a frenzy, and what is weird about the dream is that my vision was skewed and foggy the entire time, which heightened my panic. I am afraid that this dream may mean that I am subconsciously afraid that I am being deceived currently by something or someone, and that it will have a negative outcome for me. I really do believe that dreams are telling of details in our lives that our distracted every day minds cannot see, but I hope this dream isn’t an example of this.
(10) I wish that my dreams were “normal” and linear. Mostly linear. I can handle dreaming weird things, but my dreams mostly look like the editors are using iMovie for a Hollywood production. They’re never great quality. For example, last night I had four different dreams that had no correlation and were horrible jump cut scenes. In the first one, someone asked me for my address. That’s all I can remember of that dream. In the second, all I can remember is that I left a party early and almost got murdered while walking home. It started out as a sketchy drug thing but then suddenly everyone was there (by everyone I mean like 5 other people) and I was thrown into a bathtub. How did I go from walking on a street, to being in a bathtub inside a home faster than the blink of an eye? iMovie, I’m telling you. The weirdest part is that while I was in this bathtub, someone burst into the bathroom looking for their sister. I was not their sister. The next dream is one where I was in class trying to get together with my group, but the class had been dismissed. Normal, right? Think again. The classroom suddenly turned into this giant lecture hall which then transformed into a massive church. I had no idea what was going on, and even in my dream state I knew this was too weird. I tried to duck out of mass, but my father was there judging me for skipping out on this sudden pop-up worship. I woke up feeling confused because out of all of that weirdness, the one thing that didn’t add up was that my father was judging me for leaving mass. Neither of us like going to mass, so he wouldn’t have judged me for leaving. What any of this means, I have no idea. I generally don’t analyze my dreams because they never make sense anyway.
(16) I must admit to it forthwith, a deficiency borne perhaps in myself, but I’ve not ever found it in my character to dwell on dreams or impute to them an esoteric meaning therewithal. From what fragments I remember come sunrise, they’re swiftly swept aside and I’m off to whichever business does beckon me that day. Not oneirology nor tasseography—not physiognomy, the cult of Pallas Athena and the Eleusinian Mysteries, not last The Book of Mormon nor the 9/11 Truthers seem to me any more propitious than the next as references for providence or epiphany.
It may be seen frivolous or condescending, and while I wouldn’t soon take it upon myself, it’s nothing to me whence someone attains their consolation so long as it “neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg” to borrow the epigram of one Mr. Jefferson. I’d even go so far as concede that short the mystical and sibylline, numinous experience whereof the kind some find in dreams is essential the human condition. And, for all that granted: pot and lucid dreams, transcendentalism and mormonism most assuredly—the all benign like glucose tablets—even they won’t spell the end of anyone. Unmoved and more than a bit blasé, I can only wish joy to those who find their meaning of it not wholly unbemused.
For, in the end, one can only bow at the altar of free expression, thank God that he bestowed us Common Sense and The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedoms as the gospel—Jefferson and Paine his patron saints. And that though a whit irreligious, not to say sacrilegious, I may be, it’s not without due reverence to the spiritual or transcendent. My attitude, I think, best pronounced by Larkin’s “Church-Going”:
…For, though I’ve no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.So in that sage spirit, I can only sing the praises of scrutinizing meditation and sincerest self-reflection, aspiring and honing these virtues in my own person. It’s only that I, rather modestly if you ask me, would demur from the supernatural, psychic, or—so much the worst—quack psychoanalytic dimensions in my study. Better to stay sober and advantage that God-given faculty for reason, of myself, anyway, I’d choose a lucid conscious than lucid stupefaction. The alternative smacks eerily of voodoo, the charlatan, most hideous of all: dank corndogs adjacent a crystal-gazing tent at the carnival—slimy, in a word.
In view of all these foul and fell things: an age afflicted with fake news, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and fraudulent astrology the which offend our reason and our intellect outrage—let us do as our forefathers once prescribed, and in the immortal words of Thomas Jefferson: build up that wall!
(4) I dreamt about my sister and I having a simple conversation. I do not remember what the conversation was about, but I remember sitting with her, and talking like we usually do every time we get together. The dream was weird in the sense that it seemed so real.
I don’t think I had any physical feeling from my dream, or at least none that I remember of. It was just a dream: as simple as that.
Without going too into the meaning of that dream, I just believe that it means that I miss my sister, and my family in general. I miss having their familiar faces around me, and talking to them face to face. I don’t think there is anything much to say about that dream in particular.
The only thing that was a bit weird about it is that when I woke up, I was surprised to find out that I was not back home in France with her.
There was nothing too peculiar and nothing stood out. It was just her and I, sitting at home, talking. The setting was quite familiar to me because it was home, or at least, it felt like home in the dream. All I really remember seeing is my sister. I guess I just feel like the most common place where we could sit down to talk would be our house, so maybe that is why it felt like we were home.
But it is not a recurring dream.
(2) Last night’s dream was peculiar. I dreamt that my old boss was my roommate, and my friends and I had been too noisy over the weekend so he sent us an eviction letter that was approved by my landlord. I had never dreamt about my old boss before, and had never dreamt about being evicted either. I remember feeling nervous and anxious; it took me about five seconds when I woke up to realize that it was all a dream and that I wasn’t actually being evicted. This might relate to the fact that my roommates and I are going through a rough patch, but I do not know where my old boss fits in this. This is the first time I have dreamt this and hopefully it is the last. I recognized everyone in my dream – they are all people from my immediate friend circle (except my boss). It was a weird and improbable dream but it still took me a few minutes to realize that it was not happening.
(6) “You should jump off.” Standing on a rooftop, I heard an ambiguous voice chime out behind me. The voice came from so far away but it sent chill-bumps across my neck. I could not identify where the voice came from.
“You should jump off,” the voice gently repeated, “everything is done.”
My frozen body was pushed hard by that voice. The sense of weightlessness told me that I was falling and close to death. I tried my last struggle with my immovable body, the blood seemed to freeze, and a deathly chill with a sense of hopelessness swept over me. Closing my eyes, I allowed myself to fall into the darkness.
Inside the darkness, there was a sense of fluidity upon my skin. I became the river I had passed by. The river carrying my secret willing to death was my depressed imagination. Without any painfulness, my body was fragmented into various pieces: I was the water, the sediment of the river bottom, and the black stones where my name was inscribed. I was static; I was moving constantly. I was fragmented, I found the unity of myself. The river had no emotion, but only memories.
I woke up from this nightmare, trembling not only with fear, but also with a sense of pressure brought about by my life.
(3) In my dream last night, I was standing in a gaping valley surrounded by towering mountains. I screamed but no one could hear me. And the more I screamed the more panicked I felt. There were no other people, just me, screaming at the ice-cold sky.
I’ve been lost lately, and doing my best to help my cousin survive a sexual assault in her first year of University. I don’t know how to help her, so I end up just helplessly internalizing every emotion, losing my mind over the fact that I can no longer protect her, because it’s already happened.
I can interpret from this dream my sense of helplessness and feeling lost. I can also see a connection to my own sense of self and strength. I need to find a solution and do what I can right now, instead of letting the emotions from what passed destroy me. Although I can speculate, I’m not totally sure on the meanings behind my dream, but I do know that when I woke up I felt more lost and tired then when I had lay down to sleep.
(7) Last night I dreamt about the clown in ”It”. It just so happened that I was in a dark underground cave or an unfinished basement. In this basement there was only one light that was coming from a television hung upon the ceiling of this dark place. The screen was black and projected two eyes. My sleeping self knew these eyes belonged to the clown, which I had never seen before yet feared. When I had the guts to stare directly into the projected eyes, I was no longer in the dark, but I was in a semi-lit basement. It almost felt like my parent’s basement, just creepier. I was no longer alone. I was with my sister Jennee, my brother Shane, my friend Will and a random chick that I did not trust. We were trying to keep warm with our fire and my instincts told me to gather all the metal that could be used to kill someone because I was under the impression that this random girl was going to attempt to hurt one or all of us. When she saw that I was collecting the sharp metal she starred long and hard at me. I saw pure evil in her eyes, those same eyes that were on the television screen…. I was again in a different area, all alone. It looked like an old roman building that had halfway collapsed. It was foggy. I was thinking to my sleeping self how it was ironic that I could not see properly in any scene of my dream. So now that I was not angry about protecting my family and friend, I became scared of being alone with this crazy chick. All I remember was hearing noises from all around me and so I ran and ran, but I wasn’t actually going anywhere…. I stopped moving to listen since I could no longer see anything. Crick.. Crack.. from right behind me. I turned around, knowing it was my time to die, and before I completed my actions, I could see the pointy teeth, pale and dirty skin, the drool falling from its mouth, and the evil eyes of this now creature like being. It jumped forward at me as if I was a piece of meat! That is when I woke up from having a heart attack. When I became aware that I was no longer dreaming, I thought it was very strange that once again, but awake, I still could not see anything!
(8) I started taking sleeping pills when I was 16 years old, because without them I could barely sleep an hour. If ever something happens during the night, I remember it only barely. When I wake up, it is because the medicine has stopped having effect and the first 30 minutes of my day are usually a blur as I’m slowly coming back to reality and starting to think clearly again. Therefore, dreams I may have had during the night, are very rarely accessible to me unless they are very vivid or really bad nightmares. Knowing that we had to write these journal entries, I tried to focus my attention on them as soon as I woke up for the past week. I have been unsuccessful, however, and the fog that covers my thoughts when I wake up took over my mind and I cannot remember anything this morning. The last dream I remember having was about a month ago. I woke up confused because my dream felt way too real. My dream was about my work place, a specific colleague actually who’s been very disrespectful to me in the past and has always gotten away with it. In my dream, that coworker was taking credit for a new efficient way of working with our computer program in order to process data quicker (a way I actually discovered recently). Instead of me getting a raise for that discovery and for my good work, he was getting praised for his lack of work.
(14) Dreams used to come easy to me—after I learned how to remember them. As soon I woke up, I would lie perfectly still with my eyes still closed. Then, I would focus on the details of my dream until they all fell into place and created a sort of memory. Once I remembered them, I’d rush to write them down so I’d never forget—I still remember some of those dreams today.
I tried doing that again, but it’s difficult to do when you’re a restless sleeper. I haven’t slept all through the night in a while, so I knew the recollection of my dream would be fragmented and confusing. Here it is:
My subconscious decided to be an omniscient third-person narrator instead of a character. The scene was grey; everything was muted and monotone, including the voices. I remember walls—and maybe furniture?—but I also remember two main characters sitting in a car. They were arguing about something important. Then, I remember shooting and screaming, but for some reason, this memory seems false. I suspect my mind inserted this image to help me fill the gaps. It doesn’t feel right, though.
That’s all I can recall. I kept drifting in and out of sleep last night.
(1) 2h18 am, on October the 12th, I finally go to sleep. I do not recall dreaming in the first short part of my night. Around 5h20 am, I wake up, for no reason. After that, I dreamed. It approximately goes like this: every morning, my partner has to put outside some pink luggage and a glass of milk for our neighbour’s daughter. We are in an apartment building and the child’s parent puts the luggage near their door to facilitate the task. He has to do that so the neighbour’s child can get on the bus to school. I think the dream was supposed to be longer, but that part played in a loop, like Groundhog Day. Weird shit happened during the night. At 16h40 pm, I took a 20 minutes power nap but I did not dream, I only end up trying to fall asleep for 20 minutes, until the alarm forced me to get out of bed.
(13) I remember a warehouse with endless shelves of so many different things that didn’t make sense to be together, yet there they were. The shelves were wooden and the walls were a disgusting green, and the floors were a very polished dark wood. The door of the warehouse had a bell over it and it rang. I stood between two shelves and looked over at the door’s direction but didn’t see anyone there. I heard the smashing of glass on the ground and saw a splatter of blue paint on my shoes. I looked behind me and a child had knocked over an empty glass and I didn’t know why paint had spilled out of it. I followed the little boy down his aisle and went through a door where we ended up on the roof of a building.
On the roof of the building, I saw the moon in the sky where it started to melt onto the edge of the roof and slide down onto the sidewalk. I walked over to it and touched it and the melted moon fell onto my head. I moved back and sat on a chair against the chimney top. The moon melted completely and there was a hole in the night sky to reveal a clear blue one. I heard the sound of waves and water started to trickle down from the hole in the sky. The roof started to tilt and I was sliding down the roof until I hit the edge. Then it was completely vertical and I looked ahead of me and saw glass where the boy stood on the other side of it. He waved at me and made a gesture to come closer, so I did. When I was directly in front of him, on the other side of the glass, he reached forward through the glass and grabbed my arm and pulled me through.
We ended up on a beach where the sun was absolutely scorching and sand felt hot. The water kept coming closer to my feet until it reached my ankles. Soon I was chest deep in water and my chest felt heavy. I started to float and things went black. When I opened my eyes, I was in the water. I swam to the top and only my head could pop out because of the swimming pool cover over the top of the pool. I was stuck. I felt something wrap around my ankle that dragged me down.
Then I woke up.
I don’t know how to feel about my dream. Most of the time, I never do. There are times when I wake up afraid and there are other times where I’m just glad I didn’t wake up afraid. I’ve always had interesting dreams, the imagery I will never capture with words but I hope, one day, I will.
October The Twelfth 