The nature of dreams of seems almost taken for granted as an area to be decoded rather than respected as actual experience. Dreams might indeed be of the nature of a disconnected blurred sense in which we scarcely seem an experiencing subject at all, yet even in this instance, we actually still are. Unless lucid (in which though, it is still experiential) the dream is the not experienced as dream and hence, at the time, not discounted as ‘unreal’; its events, whatever they are, actually happen to us (to a greater or lesser resemblance that waking life). To discount this experience in favour of the notion that it was ‘just a dream’ is valid insofar as certain criteria of wakefulness do not apply to it, however to then reduce it to something that needs decoding, rather than being experientially relevant to the our consciousness is clearly to place an hermneutic filter on it that is ontologically reductive.

That is, if the dream happened then it necessarily happened to us. That it may or may not be the processing of various unconscious forces is neither here to there. If it terrified us then it terrified us, if it made us weep for a lost time then it also did this. This effect occured to our psyche and as such affects us in a sense like any other event that traumatises or exhalts us. This is not to deny the possibility of learning something deeper from the content of ones dreams, though the comparison with waking life is also reasonable. Our patterns in daily life also need decoding and recognising; in life we move through a quasi random series of events and encounters that may be decoded in various ways; this is also so in the dream sphere.

The emphasis on the event effect on the psyche can be considered stranger yet when we consider how many dreams we do not even know we experienced. I have various repetitive places and structures in my dream world that I sometimes forget even exist, only to sometimes, on the border of sleep, get flashes of, that remind me that there are these visited fixed places that I appear in and interact with. It is clear to me from these half recollections that there is a good deal of activity I am engaged in that I have nearly no awareness of.

This makes the picture even stranger, for initially I pointed out the necessity of the effect that dreams as events must have (since they are experienced phenomena), yet now we are drawn to the conclusion (unless we wish to deny that these events affect us) that for many of us (who do not have perfect access to our dreams) there is exists a world of experience that necessarily affects us and yet we have little or no awareness of.

This does not deny that dreams may be processing/manifesting unconscious forces, but it also means that the experience of this processing/manifesting is a) experiental and b) often unconsciously so. This raises the possibility that if b is true (hard to deny), the unconscious experience of the dream may itself then be a force that determines our reactions and responses to phenomena in the waking world. Which means in turn that dreams especially in their unconscious form, represent an strange feedback mechanism determining part of our worldly attitude and response based on the manifest forces that we have unwittingly experienced, even though those forces might be ontologically be nothing more than our own unconscious processing. This ontological reduction then, even if true, matters not in the face of this effective power.