I don't know why we sleep, and for that matter I don't know why we dream. But talking with someone today about his and my typical dreams, I realized I was hearing something familiar that I had not before associated with dreams. That is that the same mind that, in my case, processes story lines in my waking life, continues to do so when I am asleep. I don't think this is peculiar to writers at all, although I would be interested to know if anyone has explored whether people involved in the arts dream differently than the rest.
Jim was telling me about dreams he has about our cats. Invariably in the dreams he is worried that a missing window or a gap in a wall or some other insecure spot in our home will attract one of the cats who will then get out and get lost. (We keep our cats inside, the fact being that inside cats live an average of nine years longer than outdoor cats.) It struck me his dreams have a literary element in them, that being the conflict that takes the stories situation and throws it into flux. But the part of our brains that write dream stories do not concern themselves with resolution and denouement. They are focused entirely on disruption. They like the plot to keep going. So whenever a dream thrown into conflict comes anywhere close to a resolution, that part of the brain, the storyteller, twists the plot.
A very common dream of mine involves the exposition of my being in a shopping neighborhood in a city. There are quaint malls or a long street of shops. In the dreams I am intrigued by the different types of shops, many of them the same from dream to dream. But all my storyteller wants to do is throw some sort of conflict in, so my brief enjoyment of the little shop with jewelry and scarves from India is disrupted by my realization that I have missed my bus home. I try to find my bus stop, but I can't read the schedule. I look for a pay phone. They are all occupied. When I finally find one, I don't understand how to work the phone. It's not like any key pad I have ever seen. And so it goes on, with one conflict after another, until my storyteller loses interest or starts up with an entirely new exposition.
It seems that for whatever reason we dream, our brains like to spin yarns. Like a weekly movie theater serial they keep the story going by creating cliffhangers that drift into new subplots. It's enough to exhaust a person.
