We All Have Our Veils

(Digital)

Last night I dreamt of being trapped in a game (most likely Silent Hill) and descending never-ending stairways (yep, definitely Silent Hill). I was surrounded by people and none of them had faces (for fucksake, I get it: Silent HILL), so I had to wrap my face in gauze to ensure no one would notice I had a face.

One of the fun things about dreams is that we still don’t know why we have them. The leading theory of the moment is that they’re a function of memory consolidation.

I am by no means an expert on the neuroscience of memory. Not even close. I’m not the kind of doctor they let touch brains. But I am a moderately capable phenomenologist and a historian who studied memory and narrative and how those things build the world. And dreams are, I suspect, a physiological process of memory structured by a story-telling mind to understand its being in the world. Like our waking selves, dreams are “in character” for us. When they’re not, we find them alarming in a way that differs from our reaction to nightmares.

I dislike the woo approach to dreams, which implies all of our symbols are the same (that’s asinine), I dislike the Freudian approach to dreams (which has the same problem, but with more dicks thrown in). I am okay with the Jungian approach to dreams, as long as we take the stance that the person having the dream is best suited to relate the meaning of said dream and we acknowledge what I said above, that the dreaming landscape is a function of our brains and our minds.

I want to be the sort of person who sits with my dream about faceless hordes and goes “hmmmm” and nods a lot and then concludes that modern life has pushed me to feeling I must anonymize myself to survive. But my memory is jam packed with Silent Hill and Silent Hill is jam packed with people/things with extremely fucked up faces and a shit ton of stairs.

None of this means that dreams are meaningless or useless. It just means they’re complex. …You know. Like the beings that have them. All of the following are true: I want to remain unknown and unknowable, I really like metaphorical monsters, and I should probably fill my brain with something other than survival horror.