Since my late 20s, I’ve recorded my dreams every morning, curious about the wonderful dramas that unfold each night in the subterranean depths. During a trip we took a while back to Osoyoos, B.C., I got a better understanding of dreams and the role they play in our lives.
My husband and I stayed at the Observatory B&B. The rental was located on one of the highest promontories in the town, and the observatory had a world-class telescope. Jack, the “amateur” astronomer, has published six books with Cambridge university press on his explorations. Each night and morning he took his guests on a tour of the sky, exposing viewers to sights they otherwise would never experience. I was transported from Earth to constellations that I’d only read about, if that. It was a mind-blowing, life-altering experience.
Jack became interested in astronomy when he was ten and living on the Canadian prairies. He received a telescope for a gift, and that set him off. His presentations dramatized the multitudes out there in the universe that we know little about. Nor are we aware of the teeming life beyond our ordinary vision. And vision is something Jack knows about. We see things in black and white that a camera picks up in color. That shocks me. How we’re trained to see. How much our eye picks up that our brains won’t allow in. He pointed out to my husband that there could be a ghost sitting next to him, but he wouldn’t see it for a variety of reasons, reinforcing the idea about parallel universes. Jack definitely believes there is life out there.
When I reflected on this experience later, I realized that viewing through the telescope was very similar to my involvement with dreams. Like the telescope, they also take me into territory I otherwise wouldn’t know about, offering views on myself and my interaction with family and friends. But, most important, they help me to understand there is a level in all of us that we’re normally unaware of. Dreams offer us ways to explore our psyche, a universe that most of us ignore. They create subtexts, not unlike what some fiction does as well, suggesting that there are unexplored levels that are informing the on-going narrative of our lives.