If you dream of a jaguar, people are coming. If the jaguar bites you, they are not people.
I can't remember the last time I dreamed. I can't remember the last time I slept through the night. But the idea of a dream, the sense of a time and place that is not quite right, then its disappearance along with any solid memory of it. Older ideas about dreams seemed to conceive of them as bringers of gifts or warnings, fulfillment of our wishes or the threat of it. But what do they take away with them when the dreamer tries to hold on to them after waking and, predictably, they get away? What have we lost when sleep is just a blank period between periods of consciousness?
As a child, I was afraid of the dark and nights seemed to last much longer than the few hours you can count on a clock. The darkness through an open door, under the bed, or down the hall seemed to go on and on in the same way. And as I inevitably slipped into sleep, the endlessness extended into myself. Even as my body became paralyzed, the sense of my self grew or expanded to encompass the things around me, outside of me, yes, but also in me or of me. Or it may have gone the other way, with the outside seeping in. The sensation of falling, but falling where? Did I flow out into the rest of the world or did the small pocket occupied by me suddenly collapse to be filled by the outside?
The strangeness of sensations I felt in quasi-sleep states would upset me when I woke up again. Their incompleteness affected me to the point of crying at times. But even then, I could not help but wonder at the pleasure I felt when I was sick and feverish and the dreams came over me even more intensely. Home from school and medicated at times admittedly. Hours in bed half asleep, then dreaming or half dreaming.