Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Composing an essay behind closed eyes, half awake,
Attention hopscotching from idea to idea
As assorted chunks of consciousness come online;
The dream that inspired the essay unravelling bit by bit,
Caught, torn, pulled at by the mental movement
Until it evap or a ...
- - - - - - -
Fully awake now,
Clutching at a single thread,
Trying to remember where it went.
Head full of scribbles
That seem important,
But garbled and hard to read.

Where do the complete strangers in dreams come from?

Sometimes I dream about people I know, or even fictional characters I recognize (often with the faces of the actors who portrayed them, if they're from a visual medium). And sometimes there are people in my dreams who are composites, in both appearance and personality, of people I know, even if I can't always put my finger on exactly whom they're a mix of. Then there are the strangers for whom my brain borrows a familiar face: in this morning's last dream -- the only one I remember any of -- my dreaming brain stuck Jack Nicholson's face on a reporter unrelated to Mr. Nicholson or any character I've seen him portray; his was just a convenient face to re-use. But then there are the faces I don't recognize at all, not even enough to say they look like, say twistedchick caught halfway through morphing into Emily Procter (another face recalled from this morning's dream, with a personality and voice unlike twistedchick or either of the characters I've seen Ms. Procter play).

The faces I can recognize, or recognize bits and pieces of, are somewhat interesting as a glimpse into how my brain works. And how dreams work. But after having noticed how many of the faces of strangers in my dreams recycle aspects of faces I've seen in waking life, the ones I don't recognize become that much more interesting for being exceptions to the pattern I had noticed. Where do those cme from, how do they get into my dreams?

The Quaker girl in my dream this morning who mentioned to a television reporter that she thought she was "only about 40% human" was one of those dream characters whose face seemed completely unfamiliar to me. (And how I wish I could remember more of the context -- what she'd done to attract the attention of the media and what role she'd played in the dream before that. While I was mentally composing an essay about her, the question of where an entirely new face in a dream comes from caught my attention long enough for the dream to finish unravelling while I held it.)

How does someone I've never seen before get into a dream? Are such faces really made up by my unconscious out of whole cloth? Merely sewn together from pieces to small and too many for me to pick them out? Borrowed from people I saw too briefly to consciously recall while I was awake? Really nondescript during the dream and only getting details filled in as my slowly waking brain tries to reorganize dream fragments to make sense of them? (Of course, this last option merely pushes the same question to a different process.)

And how on Earth do you design experiments to answer these questions when the act of trying to remember a dream so often alters it retroactively, and when the only way to capture an image from a dream involves waking up enough to attempt to draw it (or describe it to somebody more skilled at drawing), and the act of drawing or describing it is likely to involve making comparisons to familiar real-world examples? (Would a functional MRI show hits to a "remembering somebody's face" area of the brain when knitting together a character out of familiar parts but not if a face truly is entirely new? How would you match up the timeline of the dream to the MRI data?)

And why do I keep picking questions so difficult to definitively answer to wonder about?

As for that Quaker girl in this morning's dream, I got the impression that when she said "40% human", she was implying 60% divine. And I remember wanting to ask a bunch of questions about whether that was quite the right dichotomy, given that we are made in God's image. But y'know, I now can't remember whether those were questions I came up with within the dream -- the questions that triggered starting to wake up -- or questions that I started asking after the dream, during the whirwind of ideas and impressions as my brain reorganized itself from dreaming to waking.