How Are Reflective Dreams Fun?

Some dreams apparently offer a comment on life, and these are what I call reflective dreams. The most absurd dreams are probably some of the most difficult to remember, but some are great fun, as with one recalled by the Irish poet Louis MacNeice, who had just returned from a visit in 1937 to the government's fighting front in Spain:

I had a dream at this time that I was caught by the Nazis. They took me to an enormous wall built of Pelasgian blocks. In this wall was a great wrought-iron gate of eighteenth-century workmanship. They unlocked this gate and thrust me through it, locked it behind me. I found myself in the Alps with a narrow pass before me, began to ascend the rough and desolate track. Plodding upwards, looking straight ahead of me or hardly looking at all, I was conscious suddenly of something on either side, looked to the right and the left. On the right and the left of my track, padding along in parallel silence were bears. Bears of every size and color, going inexorably forward, but looking at me sideways. I had the feeling they were 'not quite right', steeled myself to go on, careful not to annoy them. Then ahead of me, higher up the pass, I saw a woman, with a stab of joy in my diaphragm hurried to overtake her. Overtook her; she looked straight out of Bond Street, tall and blonde, the height of elegance. She too had been caught by the Nazis, I walked along beside her and the bears walked on each side of us. But everything was all right now. 'Who are you?' I said at last. 'Oh,' she said suavely, 'I am the Czar's governess.' (MacNeice, 1982)

What more can one say? It brilliantly combines a legitimate trepidation about the Nazis with a certain ambivalence (perhaps typical of those on the bourgeois left in Britain at the time) about the Russian bears who may or may not have been rescuing him, resolved in the end by the arrival of the charming governess - better keep a hold on nurse, just in case of something worse!

A reflective dream of my own occurred when I was in the midst of writing my doctorate on the role of REM sleep in the consolidation of memories. One of the hypotheses I was considering was that during REM sleep (and therefore during REM sleep dreams) the entire memory system is accessible - none of the inhibitions present during wakeful life are active, and new memories can be fitted into the appropriate cognitive structures during REM sleep.

Habitually a somewhat forgetful person, for a couple of days I had been trying to remember the name of the director of the film Such Good Friends.

In my dream I was alone on an empty road, trying to remember the director's name, when a large open-topped car drove up, and full of laughing passengers who seemed to be sharing a joke in a foreign language. The actor Robert Mitchum was in the back seat, and before they drove off I attracted his attention and said, 'Mr Mitchum, please help me. You starred in a film called River of No Return with Marilyn Monroe. Please can you tell me the name of the director, because he also directed Such Good Friends, and I haven't been able to remember his name?' Mr Mitchum leaned back, extremely relaxed, and said, 'Very sorry, but I can't remember either.' The car then drove off, but suddenly I set off running after it, shouting, 'Otto Preminger! Otto Preminger!' and woke myself up shouting out loud. Was my hypothesis correct? Even my dream about it was ambivalent!