martines' atelier

What's in a dream?

I asked one day. I mean, what can be beyond a metaphor of thoughts ans senses, beyond a product of daily emotional preoccupations?

Anatole France said long ago that "the dream is often the revenge of contempted things or the revenge of the abandoned beings". Allright, but I dreamed some day sunny shores, love and happiness. "Unfulfilled wishes, symbols of hidden preoccupations", said to me somebody. "The dream you know, exerts among others the function to communicate some things to people".

Whence the need to dream? What makes us to wish on another sweet dreams, when the night falls? I found once in a book that ancient civilizations considered the dream as an access gate to another Universe, transcedental, as another state of existence, independent of wakefulness and even of sleep... But they were primitives, believing in stories written on slabs and going to war by the vanity of their leaders. Actually, nowadays are we different at all?

I dreamed one night that I was rich. Ten another, that I was married. Today I'm neither one nor other, even though both things concern me. They say our thinking never stops, never knowing absolute repose not even in sleep and that we are dreaming to concentrate periodically on "what disturbs us more, in order to solve some aspects, to find solutions".

Moreover, what's with all these emotions that I'm feeling in a dream or with these profound emotional states for the people I see in dreams without knowing them? "What's so surprising?", asked me a friend. "If you think hard, you'll realize that the very essence of human behavior motivation is prevalent emotional. Don't you show strong feelings for people that you don't know at every football game?"

Then what should I find in a dream? Nothing more than a fantastic story, say the books. Because a dream is a place where you meet yourself, integrating the past with the future, the memory with the affection, the experience with the creativity. All of these are gates to inner world, a source of knowledge in front of which you're just an observer. Just do no forget, as Victor Hugo says, "that who dreams should be stronger than than dream. Otherwise, there's a great danger. Every dreamis a fight... A chimera may gnaw a brain."

Beyond any other's opinion, I think that a dream is something miraculous. As any other human I have memories of my own. As the time goes however, these are losing their flavor and disappear one by one. The recollection of a kiss or a handshake that I used to believe it's forever settled in my memory start to lessen under the equalizing action of time. So I thought, at least.

But comes a night when I have this completely unimportant dream and without any connection it shows me images and touching that seems real; it feels like I have seen and touched those things before but I don't know where and when. Then I suddenly wake up and all I have dreamed  gets shape and in my mind the dream's vapors rebuild the grain of memory that keeps captive recollections.

And thus I remember once again people who existed long ago and who gave me handshakes and kisses and unforgettable dreams...