There are people out there who are under the mistaken assumption that everyone wants to hear about the dream they had last night.
They’ll wake up and turn to their partner and say ‘‘Oh, wow, I had the most incredible dream’’ and then proceed to relentlessly bore them for the next five minutes.
Then they’ll go to work and figure people there want to hear all about their dream as well. And they’ll relentlessly bore them too.
These people are missing one crucial fact - hearing about other people’s dreams is intensely boring. No-one cares about how you and Mahatma Gandhi played rugby against the All Blacks on the moon or flew on a dragon to work.
Most people won’t tell you to shut up about your dreams already because they’re too polite. Which is a great pity, because it encourages people to prattle on about something utterly inconsequential to the listener - unless, of course, the listener is in the dream.
That’s the only time anyone else needs to hear about your dream. And even then they only need to hear about the bit that features them.
I don’t seem to dream very often - or if I do I only remember few of them. But I do get the significance of the dream to a dreamer.
For the dreamer, it’s like a movie they’ve just seen. They can recall certain scenes, remember the emotions they felt and the experience is extraordinarily vivid and enjoyable.
But to the listener, it’s like they’re hearing someone giving a detailed run through the plot of a film they haven’t seen – ‘‘this happened and then he did that and they went there...’’. And it’s a film that makes no sense whatsoever.
A dream isn’t an exciting story with any sense of narrative flow, it’s a disjointed, random collection of images.
‘‘So I was there and my best friend from school was too. Only it wasn’t my best friend, but she was - you know what dreams are like. We went to a dance and then a giant elephant rose up from the ground. It had a big propeller like a helicopter. Me and Larry Emdur jumped on and flew to see Father Christmas. And he had a mohawk and looked like a penguin.’’
See? It’s all gibberish.
The main reason other people’s dreams are boring is because they didn’t actually happen to you. If that adventure with the helicopter pachyderm and Mr Emdur actually happened to you, then I’d be interested in hearing about it - even though I’m not in it.
But it didn’t happen, it’s just a story that sounds like it was made up by a four-year-old and you expect everyone else to be as in awe of it as you are.
Then there are the people who are convinced that dreams mean something. So if you dream of an elephant it means you need to be more patient and that a penguin means your problems aren’t as serious as you think. I didn’t make those up by the way, they come from an online dream dictionary.
Dreams don’t have deep meanings - all they are is the result of your subconscious being let off its lead to run wild and come up with nonsensical images while your brain isn’t paying attention and keeping it in line.
I’ve got a four-year-old at home and she can make up the most amazing and often nonsensical stories. But when she gets older, she won’t do that because her brain will shut down that sort of stuff because it makes no logical sense.
So when we dream, all we’re doing is revisiting whatever part of our brain is responsible for those nonsensical children’s stories and putting together a series of random images that we have sitting up there.
Nothing more, nothing less.
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