While many dreams are narrative, many are not. This is difficult for the Western mind to appreciate, with its love of order and linearity and perspective. Sometimes traveling in another land simply does not look anything like traveling in our land, and attempts to describe it comparatively just do not work. As one of the first Apollo astronauts is reported to have said when someone asked him what the earth was like in comparison to the moon, "The moon is not like the earth. The moon is like the moon."
When engaging with Mystery and all that we term the unconscious, insisting on rational linearity may help us manage our anxiety, but it does not help us relate. It's helpful to remember, then, that a dream's preferred form of expression may not be linear or narrative. A dream may be a poem, a dance, a song, a painting, a drumbeat, a walk in the park, a sigh, a new word, a sculpture, a feeling, a being-ness, a pre-cognition. A dream may be a single crisp image or multiple exposures one on top of the other which we are simply invited to be part of and experience. A dream may indeed have a story to tell. It may be an exhausting trek, a carefree ride, a vast journey, or a short stroll. But it also may be a Divine kiss, an exchange of the breath and moisture of life. A "transmission of truth," as my friend Chris says. Would we analyze a kiss from God, or simply be grateful for it, and find a way to celebrate it? For Briggs and Peat, chaos and truth are linked. Neither is fixed or static. "Truth is what holds us all together, yet each must find it individually out of the terms and conditions of her and his own unique life."
Even dreams which are stories may not be stories with a beginning, middle and an end, in that order. The end may come two-thirds of the way through, and the beginning may be split into several parts and circle back on itself several times. I have found it useful to remember that dreams often tell stories the way children tell them, without regard for an adult's inability to 'follow along.' They interrupt themselves, they go off on what feels like unrelated tangents, they get excited and repeat themselves endlessly, they stop in the mid-- And if we ask too many questions, especially of the 'And then what happened next?' variety, they get exasperated and give us a look which suggests we are preternaturally stupid. Further, because dreams mix the senses and are able to be translocal and transrational, they may be many of these at the same time. I don't believe dreams mean or make sense as much as they are 'sense full of meanings.'
Another way to describe this is to say that dreams tend to be fractal in nature, and naturally fractal. Fractal is the word coined by mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot to describe the patterns of chaos he observed in nature, such as a coastline or a snowflake, which have self-similarity and individual uniqueness at every level, from the macrocosmic to the microcosmic, and thus inform us about the one when we observe the other. What is fractal is characterized by fractional dimensions as opposed to integer (1, 2, 3) dimensions. Mandelbrot wrote a paper that asked how long the coastline of Great Britain was, concluding that it, and every other coastline, must be infinite in length since there were infinite twists and turns at every resolution, and that because of erosion, the infinity was ever in flux.
This seems like an accurate description of the dreamworld. What is fractal in the natural world and in the dreamworld happens in between the dimensions of space and time, and I would add language, with which we are so familiar. So when we take a dream and put it into a time and space and language box so that we may better study it, analyze it and contain it, we run the risk of losing what is potentially most mysterious and most transformative. This is not to suggest that looking deeply at these dimensions of dreams is not useful. It is to suggest rather that we need to remember to not leave the dream in the box indefinitely.
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