Dreams and Instincts

Woman in Underwater Holding Round Blue Analog Bell Alarm Clock

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Suppose you want some water or you need to stretch. How do you know that this is what you want or need? You have some sensation in your body, but how do you know what it means? Sensations don't, after all, speak with words. Did anyone ever teach you how to interpret instincts and bodily desires?

No. No one did. And yet, you know. Instincts and drives speak to us in a language we understand. Because we do, we can easily get satisfaction or relief so long as the world cooperates. If we didn't know what to do about thirst or an urge to stretch, and we had to try a wide variety of things until something "fit" the need — like a person attempting to open a door by trying thousands of keys — we'd be in dire straits.

It seems then that we are fluent in the language of our urges and drives, a language without words that we know without being taught it.

Our dreams have their own language too. Theirs uses imagery and symbolism to construct narratives of varying degrees of coherence. There is a resemblance between the narrator of our dreams and the communicator of our primal needs. They are engaged in similar activities: they both translate desires, aversions, and unconscious thoughts into a language we understand. They render the unconscious conscious. We don't speak the unconscious mind's language. So if the unconscious mind wants to tell us something, it better find a way to make its message consciously accessible.

Note that non-verbal animals that likely have no capacity to interpret anything may nonetheless have dreams and instincts. This is because while both dreams and instincts can manifest themselves as signals to be decoded, they can also act on us directly, as blind causal forces. That is why pre-verbal toddlers can be moved to scratch when they have an itch. They don't know what an itch is or that scratching is a suitable response, but they are moved to scratch directly and reflexively. Cats and dogs are probably propelled to action in the way toddlers are. And if they dream, then their dreams act on them as causal forces too, making them frightened or calming them down but not sending them any kind of message, not telling them anything.

Maybe, then, the story goes like this: first, we acquired instincts and the capacity to dream. Next, we acquired language. Then we learned to interpret our bodily drives so that we are not simply moved by them but consider what they tell us and then decide what to do. Finally, we learned to interpret dreams (though as we shall see shortly, not well).

But I do not wish to overstate the resemblance between the dream narrator and the translator of our bodily drives. While the latter does something close to literal translation, alerting us to the precise needs of our bodies, the former does creative reconstruction, fancying itself a novelist, not a humble interpreter. As a consequence, there is considerably more variation in dreams across individuals than there is in the interpretation of urges and drives.

Dostoyevsky notes, relatedly, that the most uneducated person can spin an extraordinarily detailed narrative while dreaming. He says this through one his characters:

Listen, in dreams and especially in nightmares, from indigestion or anything, a man sees sometimes such artistic visions, such complex and real actuality, such events, even a whole world of events, woven into such a plot, with such unexpected details, from the most exalted matters to the last button on a cuff, as I swear Leo Tolstoy has never invented. [1]

And Robert Louis Stevenson, in an essay on dreams, goes so far as to suggest that even though he is a writer, he doubts his conscious self is anything more than an editor of work done by his dreamer self, by unseen collaborators he affectionately calls his "Brownies":

For myself—what I call I, my conscious ego (...) the one with the conscience and the variable bank account, the man with the hat and the boots, and the privilege of voting (...) —I am sometimes tempted to suppose he is no story–teller at all, but a creature as matter of fact as any cheesemonger or any cheese (...) so that, by that account, the whole of my published fiction should be the single–handed product of some Brownie, some Familiar, some unseen collaborator. [2]

Stevenson is likely underplaying the role of his conscious self. Since everyone dreams but not everyone can write a novel, it must be that whatever Stevenson and other writers do while awake is essential. But this is a side point. The more important point here is that it is remarkable we have dreams with plots we could never come up with in real life. This, then, is one way in which the dream narrator does more impressive work in rendering the unconscious conscious than the translator of bodily needs and drives does.

There is another, related, difference. While as I mentioned in the beginning, we typically understand exactly what our body is trying to tell us, for instance, whether we want to stretch or to get a sip of water, our dreams often leave us with the impression that we have failed to adequately interpret them. In this way, they can be like a rich piece of fiction whose symbolic power cannot be fully analyzed. (Symbols are often too polyphonic for us to be able to pin them down.)

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As it happens, Dostoyevsky makes this point also. Indeed, he suggests that even seemingly nonsensical and disjointed dreams can leave us with the impression we have failed to grasp their meaning:

Why, also, on awakening from your dream and entering fully into reality, do you feel almost every time, and occasionally with an extraordinary force of impressions, that along with the dream you are leaving behind something you have failed to fathom? You smile at the absurdity of your dream and feel at the same time that the tissue of those absurdities contains some thought, but a thought that is real, something that belongs to your true life, something that exists and has always existed in your heart; it is as if your dream has told you something new, prophetic, awaited; your impression is strong, it is joyful or tormenting, but what it is and what has been told you—all that you can neither comprehend nor recall.” [3]

Dostoyevsky is right that dreams often seem like riddles. Not only are dreams not a literal rendition of an underlying psychological reality, they may be full of ambiguity, and their significance could be elusive. And while it may well be that when we don't understand their meaning, there simply isn't any, we cannot say this with full confidence, as we can in the case of ordinary nonsense such as a meaningless string of symbols typed by a cat on a keyboard. That never leaves anyone with the impression it ought to be interpreted. With dreams, by contrast, we often have this strong sense that there was something there to be understood. And we half-understand it, but not quite.

This is all rather peculiar. The wordless language of our bodies makes use of sensations, not words. Those are far removed from linguistic signs and public conventions and yet we speak that language fluently. The image-based and symbols-laden language of our dreams is much closer to what we know as "language" (which is why it is much easier to describe a dream than a sensation) but we have moderate mastery at best of the imaginative dialect of our dreams.

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