Dream Priors

I don’t give much credence to most of my dreams. If you ate as much pasta as I do so close to bedtime, you’d ignore your dreams too. You’d attribute their absurdity and general lack of coherence to hyperglycemia. But every now and then, I have a dream that interests me–not so much in its content or possible interpretations, but in a certain quality that it has, a kind of dream phenomenon that fascinates me, and I’m curious if others experience the same.

Here’s a recurring dream I used to have: I’m five or six years old. I’m in a living room that I’m familiar with on a gut level, but not one that I’d recognize in the real world; it’s not in the house I grew up in, nor in a house of relatives, neighbors, or friends. In the dream, I know the room instinctively, and I have complex but ill-defined memories associated with it; and there’s a mix of intense and subtle emotions attached to those memories, like grief, longing, empathy, nostalgia, and a shared history with nondescript characters.

Here’s the interesting part: none of these feelings or emotions are explainable given what’s happening in the dream; they are merely cognitive priors of my dream self. Nor are they needed per se to facilitate or give meaning to the goings-on of the dream, which themselves vary but are typically mundane: an argument over which TV channel to watch or, even less eventful, sitting around the room doing nothing.

Those priors (or initial beliefs, if you will) are a kind of innate condition of the dream self; they existed before the dream began and are therefore not questioned by my dream self. They are just there, natural, like the dream self’s humanness or his gender. However, because not much else is going on, they account for most of the dream’s emotional salience.

Here’s an exaggerated example of this, one which I don’t personally have, but might be more relatable: you wake up from a nightmare in which you witnessed the death of your wife of fifty years. For a short period after waking up, maybe nearly a minute, you’re relieved that your wife of fifty years hasn’t really died; it was just a dream. Only after that initial relief do you realize that you’ve never been married and that you are, for example, only sixteen years old: you couldn’t have been married for fifty years. The death of the wife is the dream’s event; the fifty years of happy marriage is the dream self’s cognitive prior, one that’s necessary for the dream to have an impact.

So back to the living room dream. I used to wake up from it wondering why a mundane dream occurred in a room with such heavy and complex emotional priors, and I’d attempt to connect the room and those priors to anything from my actual memories. The closest I’d ever gotten was to link it to a child of distant family acquaintances, people I’d met once or twice when I was myself a child and then found out by overhearing the crosstalk of adults that the child '“wasn’t really theirs,” and that she was an orphan they’d adopted.

I’ve never been to those people’s house or seen their living room. In fact, I’m not even sure I’d met the child in question, but the concept of an adopted orphan (the conundrum of one’s de facto parents being ‘not really’ their parents) might have had a profound impact on my juvenile subconscious, to the point of driving my brain to work overtime at finding a resolution to it. But all it did was build a room in a dream, a mise-en-scène imbued with my own feelings and what I imagined that child might have felt apropos being adopted.

And here’s one more mystery: I have no explanation as to why I connect that dream and the room in it to that person whose existence in my real memory is no less fuzzy than the dream itself. It’s only a guess, a gut feeling.

I haven’t had that dream in years, but I was recently reminded by a different dream of this dream priors phenomenon. This dream, in my estimate, is more conventional, but the effect is similar. I’m facing a woman who doesn’t resemble physically or spiritually anyone that I know in real life; a stranger. Almost, because despite not knowing who she is, I experience in her presence an intense feeling of familiarity, one that’s so life-affirming and mollifying, a familiarity that retroactively makes sense of every random turn of events that my life has taken; every mistake and injustice rectified or given meaning–only to wake up suddenly from the dream and wonder who that was.

She was not, as in the toy example I gave above, my wife of fifty years; I didn’t explicitly know her even in the dream, but a sort of deep prior was surly at play; it was implied, and in the dream’s ‘real-time’, I was just feeling its effect.