What are dreams? I don’t mean aspirations or hopes for your future... I mean actual dreams. The ones you have when you’re fast asleep.
I used to have a reoccurring nightmare...well I say a reoccurring nightmare, but it was in fact a reoccurring character. The dream scenarios were always different, but the main character called Carlos was always the same, and the theme was always that he was systematically killing off all my friends before coming for me. Naturally I would always wake just before he got to me, but the dreams always upset me.
I remember being on holiday with a friend of mine aged about fourteen, and we befriended a couple of lads, who introduced themselves as Jim and Carlos. I was so terrified that my nightmares were about to become a reality, that I pleaded with my friend to ditch them immediately! Luckily it seems “Carlos” was actually called Ashley and was merely trying to make himself sound more exotic. I’ve yet to meet a real life Carlos, but I think my reaction will probably be fairly similar to that of Sarah Conner’s, on coming face to face with the Terminator in T2... a slow-mo slide to the floor and desperate back track with echoic “Nooooooo” before running for my life....just in case, y’know?
Naughty dreams are often the most intriguing, not least because they usually involve someone that you would never dream of looking at in “that way” during your normal day to day life. The problem is of course, that once you’ve had this dream, each and every time you see that person, you look at them in a different way...mainly because in your mind you’ve seen them naked!
Although you know the reality would probably be quite different, (because naturally your unconscious mind will always miss out the messier, more awkward aspects of sex - such as, cramp which let’s face it, is always a bit of a passion killer, or the fact that you have never, and will never be able to contort yourself into “that” position...plus you’ve probably been a little over generous in the estimation of what’s going on in his trouser department...and undoubtedly you’ve mentally airbrushed all of your wobbly bits out, to ensure that visually, the whole scenario is far more aesthetically pleasing!) never the less though you can’t help the rather pleasant mental flashbacks to your make-believe evening of passion and debauchery every time you see them. Even when you really don’t want to look at them in that way! Of course in real life you’d never act on those impulses, because they’re just dreams...but should you?
We all know our dreams aren’t reality... that they’re something our subconscious mind acts out for us, and most of the time we ignore it. Sometimes we can’t though, or it plays on our mind. We all have those dreams, the ones where we catch our partners cheating on us. The dream isn’t real but the feeling of betrayal and humiliation we encounter is the same. You get up the next morning and your stomach turns at the thought of having to give them a kiss goodbye before you set off for work, because you know what they did and you despise them for it! It doesn’t matter that it’s not real, your emotions around the subject are. Within an hour or so, you’re over it, and laughing at yourself for being upset by a stupid dream, but until then you’re in turmoil – having flashbacks to something that didn’t even happen!
How clever must our unconscious mind be to convince us that these dreams are real? At the time you don’t even question that it might not all be happening, and yet we accept that when we wake up, this little dream world we’ve been inhabiting is completely false, and we don’t let it have any bearing on the rest of our day.
It occurred to me though that perhaps we should pay more attention to our dreams. Only the other night I dreamt that I wanted to go to the loo, and when I finally found some public toilets, each of them was locked apart from one. The one that wasn’t, couldn’t be locked because it had no door. I had a choice – I could try and hold it, or I could chose to pee in front of everyone currently queuing for the other lockable stalls. I woke up desperate for the loo and I don’t think anyone can argue that my dream was my brain’s way of telling me I needed to wake up so I could use the little girls room. Thank the lord my usual conscious stubbornness doesn’t transcend to my unconscious, or I think I would have used the stall with no door, and in reality done something a teeeeeny bit childish!!
My point is though, that if our brains can use dreams to send us the most obvious instructions...alerting us to something that isn’t right, or could potentially end badly for us (!!) then why do we assume that all of our dreams are just fantasy? Anyone who has been cheated on in real life must wonder why they ignored the literal meaning behind the dreams they had of their spouses being unfaithful to them? When we've had naughty dreams about unexpected people, why do we try to convince ourselves that we wouldn’t enjoy the real life version? When let’s face it – we probably would! Surely if dreams are the only way for our subconscious to speak to us, shouldn’t we listen? I’m not saying we should always take them literally (I once dreamt that my ex was having an affair with our cat, and I’m pretty sure that never happened!) but listen to the message, because it could be entirely based in reality.
It turns out that back in 1982, when I was an infant, perhaps the world’s most elusive criminal, Ramirez Sanchez, was allegedly masterminding a series of brutal bomb attacks, hijackings and kidnappings across Europe. It was a killing spree which included a car bombing in Paris, which killed one person, and injured sixty three others without any warning. As an infant you wouldn’t think I’d have absorbed much of the news, playing in the background as I had my night feeds...but the mind is a wondrous thing. The media didn’t call him Ramirez Sanchez.
They called him “Carlos the Jackal”.
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