Photo: Axel Flowers © 2011

I don't sleep. I’ve never experienced rapid eye movement unless it's to watch my enemies line up to try and take me out. In the few hundred years I've been allowed to experience life, I've yet to catch some shut eye. To say I am tired is of no consequence since great proliferators of art never get tired. They just make art and continue to make art until their little bodies can make no more. Recently, I started communicating to my dreams, which do not exist because I don't sleep. Yet I know that my subconscious is there, waiting to be found. What language to use? How to distinguish between the code of the mind and the code of the spoken word? The other day a dashing individual who suffers from aphasia related to me a story of how the mind interprets language in a nocturnal state. He gave an example of a man who was put under test conditions for dreaming. While sleeping, the researchers spoke "Robert, Robert, Robert" to him, and later he reported having a dream about "a distorted rabbit". Hmm…interesting. Now unless there was someone meaningful in his life by that name, Robert just became a word with no discernible meaning for his subconscious mind. If the language of the subconscious is the image and the ephemeral interpretations of the world through our senses, then the waking mind must learn to decode those images and interpret it in its own language of symbols and words. The mind cannot easily make such distinctions so it looks for the closest available relationship. In this case ‘Robert’ can be interpreted as ‘Rabbit’, the fact that the subject specified it, as a ‘distorted’ rabbit could be his minds way of footnoting that it may be an incorrect interpretation after all.
Another interesting tidbit that I learned from my congruous aphasic friend is that while dreaming the mind reduces certain neurotransmitters like Serotonin, which can effect everything from memory to understanding and induces the mind into a temporary state of psychosis. Hallucinating actually, where our memory of conscious reality clashes with our subconscious fantasies. Apparently this is what happens to paranoid schizophrenics, while they’re awake.

Juan Doe