On the Epistemology of our Emotional Responses to Dreams

Nearly two years ago I had a dream which made me think.

I was on a plain, and there were two hills on either side of me. From those yellow hills, huge boulders, three to six meters in diameter, were hurtling towards me. Stuck between these imminent messengers of death, I felt panic. My mind was racing, evaluating my options and, finding none, it was panicking even more. The last thing I remember was the boulders barely a few feet away from me, as I embraced my death-by-sandwiching.

When we experience any feeling, we automatically compare it with our past feelings. As I remembered what I had felt in those moments of terror, I realised I had felt something I had never felt before. The fear of death.

I shook my head. The fear of death? I experienced the fear of death, for the first time, in my dream? But how was that possible? How could my dream supply my mind with information that previously wasn’t there? How could something that never really happened, induce in me a feeling of something new, something I was yet to actually experience in my life?

What was the source of this information? How did this knowledge arise?

I shared this experience with a couple of friends through my preferred mode of communication – email. And then that thread receded into the confines of the past.

This morning, I received a reply on that thread from one of those friends. He had had a terrifying dream, one which he was sorely trying to forget. Towards the end he mentioned ‘…I know now “how will I feel like if I were raped”‘.

I felt a conflicted feeling of solemn amazement. Fear of death is a very generic feeling. We may never have actually felt or even given conscious attention to this fear, but it is something we inherently know and which silently lurks beneath our awareness. The only constant is change, and the only certainty is death.

But rape?

Rape is abhorrent, the most diabolical crime imaginable. Well into our journey into the twenty first century, we are still centuries behind our times when it comes to gender equality. Rape has always been a tool of subjugation, a weapon to subdue. Due to a variety of reasons I won’t go into so as not to digress, the average female lives in a constant fear of violence directed from the opposite gender, both physical and emotional.

My biased mind could not help but see it a bit differently than if a female friend had written about the same thing to me.

Let me clarify.

I contend that the fear of death is a common sub-conscious strand for all people, irrespective of gender.

I then contend that fear of violence from the opposite gender is a similar strand, albeit this time very conscious and palpable, but specifically for females.

So how could a fear that is normally not associated with the male gender, arise in the dream of a man?

Admittedly, what my friend dreamt could have been a result of some experiences of his own life, yet the above question was enough to point me towards, what I think, is a potential solution to the question posed at the beginning of this piece.

The pivotal observation, and something which has also been extensively covered in recent media, including movies like Inception, is that we are unaware of the process of dreaming. Our subjective experience of a dream while in it is indistinguishable from our experience while we are awake.

How does that make a difference?

It implies that if we faced a particular situation for the first time in our real life, which was then deleted from our memory (to prevent it from acting as a benchmark for our reaction the next time) and we were then made to face that same situation again but in a dream, our emotional response in both the cases will be almost the same because, and this is important, our subjective experience in both the cases are identical.

Put simply, our subjective emotional response to a particular situation will remain the same, even if the source (and the very nature of the source) of that experience was changed without our knowledge. This is the same reason why pranks work – you are not aware that it is a prank and take it to be real, in its full intensity.

There is another very important thing to notice here.

My friend had mentioned ‘…I know now “how will I feel like if I were raped”‘ (emphasis mine). The dream had only opened up, or brought into his conscious awareness, his own subjective emotional response to a particular situation i.e. it did not give rise to any new objective piece of information.

In other words, even given that our dreams can supply us new information, they can never be a source of truth, for truth is objective. My friend could never have found out what it feels like to be raped, only how he will feel if it were to happen to him.

So dreams are like recipes. Ignoring for now the source of what we see in a particular dream, its content still acts as a stimulator which cooks up a realistic scenario, an experience felt in its full lucidity, and then our own life, our memories, our thoughts, biases, prejudices, hopes, dreams, aspirations, fears, phobias and residual consciousness gives rise to our own subjective emotional response, which is as genuine as if we had actually experienced that dream in real life, for one believes it to be real.

So the next time you wake up from a dream experiencing something for the first time, remember that you have been pranked by your own subconscious.