In Christabel, there’s an interesting tension between things we see at night and things we see during the day. Christabel’s first reaction, after her night with Geraldine, is to brush it aside and deny the realities of her experience. Barcy’s night-time vision, by contrast, becomes the driving force of his character. Consider Coleridge’s exploration of the contrasting attitudes about the veracity of our dreams. Write about a particularly vivid dream you had. When you woke up, how did you react to that dream?
I thought this prompt would be especially interesting considering my somewhat troublesome relationship with sleeping. When I was really young, believe it or not, I actually slept too much. I had a tendency to sleep a lot at night and to still nod off during class (according to my parents, art class and fingerpainting especially had this effect on me). In fact, to hear them tell it, I constantly sort of stumbled around in this half-awake stupor, ready to sleep whenever the opportunity presented itself. Actually, that’s probably not much different than today, only then it was caused by an overabundance of sleep and now it’s caused by a lack of sleep.
On to dreams. I generally envy people who have the sort of dreams Barcy has. You know, the type you read about in books that are always vivid and clear and get turned into prophecy and metaphors for some universal truth. I wish I would have dreams like that. Well, unless I turned into the male equivalent of Cassandra. My hair is weird enough as it is without me tearing at it and screaming all the time.
I have a friend who has sleep paralysis and another who has lucid dreams. Hearing stories from them about their conditions always fascinates me. One of the main underlying causes (among other, weirder ones) of the insomnia I’ve had trouble with since I was about ten or twelve is that I always want to be doing something, writing something, working or thinking about something, and the idea that sleep could possibly reveal some meaningful or weighty experience is an alluring one for me. If I could have the kinds of vivid, realistic experiences these friends have in their dreams, I wonder if sleeping would be easier for me.
When I was younger (between the sleeping-too-much phase and the sleeping-too-little phase), I used to sleepwalk all the time. But I don’t remember it clearly at all. I would wake up to my parents telling me outlandish stories about how, the night before, I had come down to the living room in the middle of the night and had conversations with them, or made myself food to eat or something similar, but I wouldn’t remember it at all. I was also known during these episodes to speak in some bizarre tongue that only I (apparently) understood.
I also very occasionally have a very vivid, “real-life” type dream. Perhaps because of the rareness of these dreams, I tend to take them very seriously, in an almost mystical way. Usually if these kinds of dreams suggest some course of action to me, I’ll try to follow it in real life. I’m not exactly sure if that’s because I think the dreams are “true”, per se, or just because I like doing random things to make life interesting. Actually, I think it’s because when I have a “real” dream, it’s so real to me that sometimes I have a hard time even realizing it’s a dream. For example, when I was a kid I was obsessed with Super Nintendo (okay, and I still am). My favorite game at the time was Final Fantasy 2, and one night I had a vivid dream that I had gone downstairs to the living room and found the game on the coffee table, left as a gift by my parents. When I woke up, I hurried downstairs, feeling as if I had, in real life, just left the game there moments before. Of course it wasn’t there, but the dream had been so real I spent about three hours searching the house before I satisfied myself that the dream hadn’t actually happened. I’ve been known to this day to sometimes recall entire, detailed conversations to friends, or incidences I was involved in with them, thinking that these things actually occurred, only to be assured over and over again that I simply dreamed them.
This type of dream only happens to me maybe once or twice a year, though. I generally dream every night (or every other night), but my dreams are always just sounds, snatches of images, smells, blotches of color…sort of what you’d see if you could animate those drawings people did on LSD for those Army tests back in the 50s. A lot of the things I dream about are abstractly interesting, for sure, but as far as deriving real meaning from them? Doesn’t really happen.
I used to think people’s reactions to their dreams were dictated by their personality. One of my friends, who is a bit of a mystic, seems inclined through her personality to take things like dreams at face value as “messages for life”. My dad, who is a very pragmatic guy, would likely laugh this off as nonsense. But now I wonder if maybe the content of the dreams themselves are more to blame. I have a tendency to believe in fantastic things (if for no other reason than that they make life more interesting), but even I am leery of treating dreams as some kind of message from the astral plane. At the same time though, I have dreams that my brain inherently finds impossible to separate from waking reality. So that’s a bit of a problem.
I think there’s something inherent in nighttime, and the way in which it impedes vision (the sense, of course, that we put the most trust in) that makes us question our experiences and our perceptions. No matter how many lights we have, how many distractions, it only takes a few minutes in the middle of a dark forest at night to have us hearing and seeing things that aren’t there, and not hearing or seeing things that are. I honestly think that in terms of Christabel, Christabel knows full well what actually happened when she awakes in morning; she is just hoping that perhaps she is wrong, and that her experience with Geraldine might turn out to have been - or at least will be able to be explained away as - a figment of her imagination. For Barcy, who likely already has a bit of a bent towards the fantastic (as a bard), his dream gives him a purpose, gives his life a grand meaning…and who’s going to question that? It’s a good thing to have.
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