Transcript: a collection of stolen dreams
I’ll never forget the day my turtle died.
I had always told my mother I wanted to be a vet. So, it was appropriate that for my 6th birthday I got Luciana (who I named after the most popular telenovela actress of the time). I dreamed about having a huge farm where turtles like Luciana could be taken care of. It was a nice dream.
About a year later, I was at a farm with my friend Valentina, and I brought along my pet, of course. I’d always pack her in my backpack along with some carrots (she didn’t like lettuce). I accidentally left her unsupervised and Valentina stepped on Luciana while on a horse. The same horse which I would later that day see give birth.
Both the birth of the foal (which I recently learned is the name of a baby horse) and the death of my turtle made me nauseous.
My mom consoled me by telling me that it was time that I realized that being a vet was not for me. She’s always been a realist.
My brother taught to dream, to dream big. He told me the sky was not the limit because apparently there was this thing where you could reach for the stars.
But he also reminded me to always stay grounded. Dream big as long as…
Then there are the other kind of dreams. The ones I am incapable of remembering when I wake up. The ones that are not only an act of communication; but an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself. Our dreams prove that to imagine - to dream about things that have not happened - is among mankind’s deepest needs.
"On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on. He'd dreamed he was going through a grove of timber trees where a gentle drizzle was falling, and for an instant he was happy in his dream, but he was awaken when he was spattered with bird shit. "He was always dreaming about trees," Placida Linero, his mother, told me twenty-seven years later, recalling the details of that distressing Monday. "The week before, he'd dreamed that he was alone in a tinfoil airplane and flying through the almond trees without bumping into anything," she said to me. She had a well-earned reputation as an accurate interpreter of other people's dreams, provided they were told to her before eating, but she hadn't remarked any warning prophesy in those two dreams of her son's, or in the other dreams of trees he'd described to her on the mornings preceding his death."
“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”
There’s a theory from evolutionary psychology that’s pretty popular, and it argues that dreams have a survival function. They give us a chance to practice for things we’re stressed out about in real life.
The idea is that we wake up, and we’re more prepared to tackle the things we faced in our nightmares. That would also maybe explain why dreams tend to involve more primal settings.
Let’s suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream you wanted to dream,
And you would naturally as you began on this adventure of dreams, fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure. And after several nights you would say, "well that was pretty great." But, if you have a dream that isn’t under your control, you become more and more adventurous. You can feel yourself, not as a stranger in the world, not as something here on probation, not as something that has arrived here by chance, but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental. What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.
“I dreamed about that woman who dreams.
I dreamed she was dreaming about me."