By Robert Perea
Sometimes when I’m not quite ready to fall asleep, I leave my phone on the nightstand with music playing low, just enough to keep the silence company. What’s strange is how often the music follows me into my dreams.
A few nights ago, I dreamed that I was in a building after an earthquake. Or at least that’s how it seemed. I don’t remember dreaming about the quake itself, but the best I can recall is that I was three or four stories above the ground in a room full of people. The windows were all broken and I could see nothing in the distance but rubble and dust.
The room next to us was also full of people, and I could hear music that sounded like it was coming through the wall. Suddenly, the music changed, and it seemed to be closer. When I finally woke up, I found that the song that was playing in my dream was still playing on my phone. When I opened the app to check the history, I realized the songs that had recently played were the same ones I’d heard in the dream.
How does a song slip into a dream? Science offers theories that the brain doesn’t fully shut off during sleep, and sound can thread its way into the subconscious. But that doesn’t explain the feeling of that uncanny moment when the dream and the waking world overlap, when melody becomes memory and memory becomes metaphor.
Wondering about dreams is one of the oldest and most universal human fascinations. When I was a child, I was particularly drawn to the biblical story of Joseph, the boy with a coat of many colors and a gift for interpreting dreams. According to the story, Joseph was in a prison cell in Egypt when the Pharaoh ordered him brought from the dungeon to interpret two troubling dreams that his own advisors couldn’t explain.
According to the story, Joseph correctly predicted seven years of feast followed by seven years of famine.
Pharaoh may have gotten his answer, but most of us aren’t so lucky. We wake up with fragments, broken windows, a song through the wall, and we carry them into the daylight like half-read letters, if we’re lucky enough to remember them at all.
Those letters arrive like mail from a place that doesn’t exist on any map, and we don’t know who sent them, or what they mean.
But maybe meaning isn’t the point. I long ago gave up on ever being able to understand what my dreams mean. I’ve come to believe dreams aren’t puzzles to be solved, but invitations to wonder about something the night won’t explain.
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