The Royal Road

On dreams, Freud, and what we cannot bear to know about ourselves

“Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious”

Sigmund Freud

It’s always the same dream. By now, I know it by heart. The setting is different. Sometimes I am in the plains, at other times in the mountains. Sometimes its daytime, other times its evening. Sometimes I’m alone, other times with a friend or family member. But it’s always the same dream. I’m driving a car and I realize that there are no brakes. The car accelerates, we are going faster and faster and it’s all I can do to keep control of it. I know that up ahead somewhere, I will need the brakes, I will lose control and then...what will happen? Curiously, there is no panic although I am worried. The feared crash never does happen. I drive as best as I can, screeching around curves, slowing down uphill then speeding up again downhill, always acutely aware that I am not in control and somewhere, soon, this is going to end badly. But it never does. I wake up and the dream goes away, until the next time.

Before Freud came along and long before modern medical research reduced dreams to just another function of the sleeping brain, they occupied a hallowed place in human imagination. Dreams were always considered a portal to the hidden world, foreseers of the future, revealers of secrets, gateway to the world of spirits and demons. Ancient humans dreamt of faraway places and long-gone loved ones and concluded that dreams allowed one to leave one’s body and roam the earth and the heavens, to cross the boundary of death itself and be reunited with those we love who had passed away. In dreams, we can fly, have powers that we can only dream of in real life, be rich, beautiful, strong, immortal. We can be both the dreamer and the dream watcher at the same time. We can fulfill our fondest desires and indulge our wildest fantasies.

Dreams hold a special fascination for mental health professionals. As a psychiatrist, it matters less what the dream actually means and more what the dreamer ‘associates’ with the dream: what feelings, ideas and fantasies come up as we discuss it further.

Modern neuroscience tells us that the brain does not simply switch off during sleep. Quite the contrary: while its electrical activity changes, the sleeping brain remains as busy as its waking counterpart — and during dreaming, busier still. Sleep moves in cycles, alternating between a deep, largely dreamless phase and a lighter one called REM — Rapid Eye Movement — in which the eyes move behind closed lids exactly as they do in waking life. This is when we dream. The rest of the body, meanwhile, is held in near-complete stillness — a paralysis that ensures we do not act out what we are experiencing and wake our bed partners, or ourselves. Everyone dreams. Not everyone remembers. What we tend to recall are the vivid dreams, the frightening ones, or those that surface just before waking — close enough to consciousness to leave a trace.

But this doesn’t answer our original question. What does a particular dream (especially a recurring one) mean? Sigmund Freud believed that dreams are a window into a person’s unconscious — that vast subterranean realm that houses our most intimate, powerful and frightening impulses, desires and fantasies. We cannot access it in our waking state since what dwells within it is both powerful and terrifying. Freud went so far as to say that most of our life decisions and actions are driven by what resides there; that what we consider rational decisions and life choices are in fact retroactive. We make important choices under the influence of our unconscious and only later rationalize them.

There was one way, Freud believed, in which one could gain access to the unconscious: dreams. The rational mind is suspended during sleep. What ordinarily remains buried can surface unhindered into awareness. But it never arrives plainly. It appears instead in symbols, images, and ideas that seem fantastical, magical, sometimes disturbing — because that, according to Freud, is the form in which these contents actually exist beneath consciousness. It then becomes the task of the dreamer to decipher its symbols, trace its images back to their origins, and assemble them into something legible.

And the dream that I keep having over and over? There is another one. Evening is falling, I am looking for someone, someone close, someone I love. The feeling is longing, sadness, urgency. I walk around, perhaps it’s a garden, perhaps a rooftop. I look at the horizon and the sun is fading away into orange. Darkness is falling and I have not found what I am looking for.

Both dreams are showing me something. The first one is telling me I am not in control, of my life, my destiny, anything I do. I can only do the best I can and hope it turns out well. The second one is warning me that time is running out. I need to find whoever I am looking for before night falls and it all ends. And who am I looking for? Myself. The dream is telling me that I still have not lived life as fully as I must, before it all ends. I must embrace all of it, my fears, my desires, my deepest needs, acknowledge them all and shine a light on them so they stop haunting me.

As a young man, Ghalib understood it well when he wrote:

“Rau main hai rakhsh-e Umr, kahan dekhiyay thamay/Ne haath baag par hai na pa hai rakaab main”

(The Steed of life/Age is in full gallop, let us see where it halts/there is no hand on the reins, nor a foot in the stirrup).

(First published in “The News on Sunday”)