The Stuff of Which Oneirology is Made

"The Persistence of Memory" (1931) by Salvador Dali

“In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” is the title of a famous Delmore Schwartz short story taken form the epigraph to a Yeats' book of poetry, Responsibilities. The story indeed deals with a dream that the main character eventually wakes up from. But dreams are an odd thing. Freud wrote The Interpretation of Dreams and he called dreams "the royal road to the unconscious.” The American psychiatrist Allan Hobson takes a far more prosaic attitude towards dreams in which dreaming is a response to physiological stimuli. Giorgio de Chirico’s dream-like landscapes depict streets that are often depopulated and there's the famous dream in Bergman’s Wild Strawberries where the professor goes to the town where the clocks have no hands. Clocks, in this case dripping ones, also appear Dali’s dreamlike painting “The Persistence of Memory.” People often treat their own dreams like the Sphinx Riddle, seeking out soothsayers and even analysts who will look into their crystal balls for answers, while failing to realize that the only real significance to dreams is what the dreams mean to the dreamer. Of course in the bible Joseph interprets the Pharaoh’s dream. Was the author of that sacred text a little like the French Structuralist Claude Levi-Straus, an archeologist of symbols and signs? Dreaming can be a treacherous landscape since it’s like the ice cream Sunday of the artistic or writerly palette. A dream seems so pregnant, yet where is the objective correlative? The conjuring of an isolated imagination is not necessarily interesting and informative in and of itself. In this sense dreams can be the shoals upon which a creative project can become wrecked. A dream may often be like a beached whale which has become misled by its own built-in sonar.