Dreams

Psychologists and neuroscientists majorly shifted popular understanding of dreams during the 20th century. As an author born and working through the late-20th century, Pastan witnessed these changes and built them into her work.

Pastan confirms that dreams offer her much inspiration and imagery for her work, crediting “the mad freedom of the dream state” (Kernan, Michael. "Dreams &." The Washington Post, 17 Dec. 1983). In a profile in The Washington Post, she said she preferred to work early before “the visions melt” (Kernan). During this time, her imagination still runs “loose in that landscape of wishes” and “detached from the engines of reason” (Kernan).

“The landscape of wishes” echoes psychoanalysis creator Dr. Sigmund Freud’s theory of dreams. Freud understood dreams as unconscious, disguised manifestations of inner desires. A person dreams because they cannot fulfill their wishes during their waking life. Freud explained that nightmares expressed guilt or processed trauma.

He introduced his dream theories in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899). Even though many became outdated, Freud’s theories and methodology remained popular among psychologists into the 1950s—Pastan’s early adulthood years.

Aspects of Freud’s theories come out through Pastan’s dream lover. Innocence frequently stands in for virginity, romantic inexperience, and youth. Pastan “woke [up] innocent” after her sensual dream because she lacks experience in love (Lines 31-32). She looks up at the sky and recalls his smile, signaling that she yearns and searches for romantic intimacy (Lines 34-35).

Except for “he” pronouns, her lover comes off nondescript (Line 34). She uses “a” instead of a possessive pronoun or “the” when she brings him up (Line 31). This grammatical choice reflects Freud’s disguised wishes and evokes Dr. Carl Jung’s archetypes from his dream theories.

Another early 20th-century psychologist, Jung theorized that dreams had a more regulatory and analytic purpose. Dreams balanced the conscious and subconscious, illustrated personal issues and solutions, and ran simulations of potential future events. A person understood those messages through interpreting mythic archetypes and symbols. Jung listed the lover in his 12 Jungian archetypes. The lover represents intimacy, love, and a need for union with others or within the self. Pastan’s lover represents a desire to know other people and bring fantasy into reality through a Jungian interpretation.

While Jungian and Freudian dream interpretation still cast a shadow on the cultural understanding of dreaming, Pastan’s “Dreams” also reflects the scientific discoveries about sleep from the 1950s through the 1970s. Both Jung’s and Freud’s theories fell out of favor as the methodology and technology for studying sleep advanced, especially with the discovery of the REM, Rapid Eye Movement, sleep stage in 1953 (Foulkes 609). The brain lights up with activity during the REM stage.

By the 1960s and 1970s, scientists asked study participants about their dreams immediately after the participants awakened instead of waiting to hear about them in set appointments much later. Harvard professors Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley proposed that the brain’s nighttime physiological processes caused dreaming. As the brain undergoes these processes, it creates dreams to explain them.

“Dreaming may be our most creative conscious state, one in which the chaotic, spontaneous recombination of cognitive elements produces...new ideas,” said Hobson (Cherry). Pastan follows this impulse in “Dreams” as she constantly builds similes into new similes. Dreams are leaves that become birds that become sand. The sand gives way to the sea, crawling over it with a knife. The dreamscape continually yields new ideas. When Pastan awakes from her dreams, she quickly sees remnants of her dreams and feels inspired by the natural world. She immediately imagines the sky as a fruit, “starry to the very rind” (Line 33).

Researcher William Domhoff found that most sleepers dreamed about the familiar: people they knew, activities they regularly did, and places they visited (Stoddart). Around the time Pastan published “Dreams,” researchers discovered evidence that dreams impacted memories. In 1976, psychiatrist Chester Pearlman reported that dreams helped transfer newly learned information and events of the day into long-term memory.

Pearlman also noted that dreams often reflected the emotions people experienced during the day. He suggested “that dreaming may help people cope” with their life events ("Dream More to Remember Better." Science News, vol. 110, no. 9, [Society for Science & the Public, Wiley], 1976, pp. 135).

Pastan encounters familiar figures and places in “Dreams.” The opening lines,

Dreams are the only 

afterlife we know;

the place where the children

we were

rock in the arms of the children

we have become (Lines 1-6),

link dreams to memories. They also establish that people can recognize past hurt and heal through dreaming. The image of her “father / in knickers and cap / waits on that shore” also reads like a scene Pastan initially encountered throughout her waking life (Lines 19-20). Since dreams theoretically preserve events in long-term memory, her dreams about her father could be enshrining a moment with her father. “The reel unwinds” evokes a camera, a recording device (Line 28).