Weird dreams

Lately, I've had two particularly weird dreams that have made me ponder the layers of consciousness in our minds and the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious.

My initial awareness of the layers of consciousness came when I started doing yoga and realized that while a part of me was intent on focusing and breathing and chanting another part was reviewing my agenda for the day and impatiently awaiting for me to get on with my itinerary. It wasn't that one prevailed over the other, but that they both existed and operated at the same time.

More recently, that awareness has been heightened by two types of dreams I've had.

In one dream, my conscious self is asleep and my unconscious self, but which is the one alert inside my head (or wherever it is that we inhabit when we are not awake), wants my body to wake up. My body does not obey and remains immobile. Recently, I had to scream at myself within myself to awaken my sleeping body into consciousness. That was very weird.

The memory has a high degree of creepiness because I tend to wonder what would happen if at some point I'm unable to awaken myself or, alternatively, if this is what the soul experiences once the body is dead. Creepy, indeed.

The second kind of dream, or whatever it is, happens when I'm trying to get something accomplished in the dream but I'm so sleepy (in the dream) that I can't keep my eyes open and I have trouble seeing what I'm doing or where I'm going (in the dream). Thus, I'm walking around with eyes half shut, thinking that I should actually get some rest before I attempt whatever it is I'm trying to do since I can't even see my way around (in the dream).

That dream is kind of funny since, of course, my actual seeing eyes are shut. But it's almost like my dream body is being impaired by my sleeping body, because my real body is sleeping and dreaming, thereby creating the dream body itself. Very Borges of me, if I may say so myself.

In researching the African presence in Cuba and Puerto Rico for my honor's thesis in college, I did research on santería and on voodoo as well. If I remember correctly back more than 20 years ago, in voodoo the belief is that the soul goes out of the body when we sleep. Thus, it's not that we're dreaming but that the soul is actually experiencing another dimension and having its own adventures wherever that dimension is found. When we wake, we call the soul back into the body.

I'm not sure what dreams are, exactly, but I like the voodoo idea much better than the uptight white European Freud's theories of sexual repression and of women having penis envy and of men lusting after their mothers. What a killjoy that man was!

My most recent dreams, or whatever they are, sure feel like my consciousness-in-dreams is the one that is doing the alert adventuring while my body is inert and unconscious. It's all quite dreamily unclear and weird, indeed.