We can speculate about how the hypothetical dream-maker’s motives for initiating the dream influence the length of the dream. Is there a complex message to be delivered in the dream, necessitating a lengthy dream? Perhaps, only a splash of cold water (a short, vivid dream) is needed to “wake up” the dreamer to some critical condition in their life. Obviously, there might not be any dream-maker and no good reason for believing that dreams are nothing more than random cell firings. Dreams are short or long depending on the duration of the REM period. Or is the length of a REM period short or long, depending on the dream’s duration? This is a chicken-or-egg issue: which determines which (REM or Dream)?
Movement of the Dream
A second structural property concerns the movement of a dream. In some instances, there is no movement. The dream is a short, spectacular Flash Bulb. Either the dream itself is this quick glimpse, or the only thing we can recall when being awakened by the dream is this immediate segment of what might have been a longer dream.
Other dreams involve Linear Movement. A story is played out—be it fairly mundane or quite bizarre (such as my opening dream). A linear dream has to somehow come to an end, unless we wake up before the story has fully played out. Some dreams have a happy ending. We embrace our father (who died many years ago), or we finish writing that passage in our book (the content of which was never made clear in the dream). Sometimes, we are the hero of the dream. We end up slaying the dragon (or however the evil force manifests itself). At other times, we are the caring “Earth Mother” who nurses the wounded forest creatures or the protective “Divine Father” who takes care of the frightened child.
Other dreams do not end well. We end up being a Victim rather than a Hero. Everything collapsed in front of us. We roll off the bridge in our wheelchair, falling through space (as occurred in the Pelican dream). The evil force wins out, and we escape in defeat. One of the wise observations made by many dream interpreters is that we never die in our dreams. There is some truth in this observation, for it is hard to imagine what death would look like. Actually, we probably do die at the end of some negative dreams; it is just a matter of waking up and shuddering at what has just taken place in our world of dreams.
A third version of the linear dream closes much like my dream did. To borrow from T.S. Elliott, the dream ends with a “whimper rather than a bang.” As in the case of my dream, the dreamer is simply tired out and doesn’t have any energy to travel further. In these cases, the hypothetical dream-maker (if there is one) might simply have run out of lessons to teach the dreamer.
There is a third type of movement that occurs in some dreams. It is Cyclical Movement. We end up in the dream where we started. Much as in the case of the Wizard of Oz movie or Homer’s Odyssey, we start at home and return home. At the start of the dream, we might instead start with a blank sheet of paper, work diligently on placing words on this page, crumple up what we have done, and end the dream with that blank piece of paper. This is the nightmare facing many of us who do a considerable amount of writing. Other people will have a similar journey, moving from the state of affairs at the start of a project to some activity and then some defeat. There is then a return to the state of affairs that existed at the start of the dream. This type of cyclical dream is just as nightmarish to the project planner as is the blank page to the writer.
