Excerpt from "Tracks in the Wilderness of Dreaming" by Robert Bosnak

Excerpt from "Tracks in the Wilderness of Dreaming" by Robert Bosnak

Dreams to me are a mystery and so are the inhabitants of the dreamworld.
This absolute not-knowing became apparent to me, appropriately, in a dream. The
dream has worked on me ever since I first took part in it in 1983, forever chang
ing my basic attitude toward dreaming.
It is morning. With my son, David, I have been walking around my alma mater, Lei
den University in Holland. We are walking along the main canal, the Rapenburg, j
ust past the bend across from the old University Library. It is a nice day and I
'm pleased to be able to show him my old stomping grounds. We are approaching th
e bridge next to the Academy, the central building of the university, built in t
he thirteenth century. I point out the most important features of the town, remi
niscing about the good times I used to have there. My youth is very present to m
e. My son is about nine years old during this walk.
Suddenly I see something in the canal. I look closer, and notice it is some kind
of ancient statue. I point it out to David. We look at each other and without h
esitation we both jump in. The water isn't very cold. I dive under and begin to
pull the statue up. It is Mercury, the one of the winged feet, carrying his staf
f with the two snakes, his left hand up in the air in the way you would hail a c
ab in New York City. This image adorns the ring I always wear on my left ring fi
nger.
We struggle to get the statue out of the water. It is hard work and has a solemn
feeling to it, as if we were excavating something ancient and sacred. With grea
t effort we succeed in getting it onto the quay. We stand and look at it. It is
at this point that I realize I am dreaming. I look at the bridge and see that it
is entirely real. I feel the ground under my feet and know it is firm. I look a
t the sky and observe the clouds. This world is absolutely real, and yet I know
for sure that I am dreaming.
Now David is gone. In the distance, on the same side of the Rapenburg as I am no
w standing, I see a cab coming toward me. There are no people in the street, but
I hav to share my excitement with someone: I know that I am dreaming, and yet t
his world is entirely real. So I rush out into the street and stop the taxi. The
cabdriver lowers his window and looks at me, a questioning look on his face. I
yell at him, "I'm dreaming. This is all a dream. You are part of my dream!"
At first the cabdriver looks incredulous. Suddenly he seems to realize that I mu
st be some kind of lunatic, and the expression on his face is a combination of b
oredom and slight disgust. He rolls up the window and drives off.
I would have reacted the same way as the cabdriver. Wouldn't you? If someone tol
d you that you're part of his dream, you'd think that person must be insane. The
cabdriver lives in the world that I call "dream." At the very moment of the dre
aming itself, his existence is as real to him as mine is to me now. The fact tha
t, when awake, I call their world "dream" means nothing to the people who live t
here. We don't know whether the dream people exist beyond the moment of our pres
ence in the dreamworld, but one thing is apparent: from the perspective of the i
nhabitants of each particular dream, the reality they find themselves in is thei
r reality. Dream people like the taxi driver live inside this reality - this phy
sicality surrounding them everywhere - in the same way that the "I" in the dream
lives inside the dreamworld with the unshakable conviction that the surrounding
reality is, indeed, utterly real.
If the dreamworlds and their dwellers are real and entirely unknown to us, they
must belong to wilderness, to unknown lands with laws of their own and creatures
untamed, fascinating, and frightening. In psychoanalysis we call these realms "

unconscious" - which, of course, means "I don't know," or "I don't know what I'm
talking about."
A profound not-knowing is hard to bear. We wake up and try to get a grip on our
dreams. We tame them with interpretations. We try to make them into pets, to ren
der them relatively harmless, not like the unpredictable wild creatures they rea
lly are. We tell our dreams that they are our dreams, that we created them. We t
ell them they are the random products of the crossfire of synapses, or perhaps t
he creations of goddesses and gods. We try to convince them that they are metaph
ors, a subtext of our existence, that they are a reshuffle of unbearable childho
od experience. We bind them in weavings of reason, until they are butterflies pi
nned to the grid of self-knowledge.
Yet, each dream is an act of genius. Ponder this:
A dreamer creates an entirely real world, to the greatest detail. Each dream aro
uses within us the conviction that we are in our waking lives. This fully awake
dream state has precision; it has detail; it has shapes that are likely and some
times unlikely, yet realistic enough to make us certain as to the status of our
consciousness. Compare this with the greatest human-made work of visual art you
can imagine. The Sistine chapel in Rome comes to mind. When we look up at the ce
iling we are awed by the extraordinary power of Michelangelo's genius. Yet we ar
e not convinced that, if we were up at the ceiling, we could jump into those hea
vens - something of which a most ordinary dream of jumping in the air while walk
ing in a field on a s unny day can convince us, with the greatest of certainties
.
While dreaming we know that every tree is real, that every particle of air is re
al into the depth of our lungs; we know that the sky is bright with the light of
utter reality. We know ta three-dimensional world surrounds us on all sides: a
world that is not just above us, as is the ceiling of the Sistine chapel, but ev
erywhere. This simple world, created by the dreaming genius, is more real than t
he greatest work of human art.