“All these are beyond the reach of our knowledge, and we purposefully bewilder the clairvoyance of knowledge that seeks our company when the red lines are drawn. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”
I was unaware of what I was doing when the inspiration for this essay was bestowed upon me, and the title, which I think portrays a fanciful and deliberate yet profound meaning — dreams painted on canvas. However, something unfamiliar yet condescending saturated my entire body at the mention of it.
Holistic conversations on Dream(s) are seldom discussed in private and public forums, thereby making it a difficult debate. In our contemporary settings, idealistically, among young people, dreaming may have been cahooting alongside claustrophobic due to the shyness attached to the expressiveness of it.
Before I begin to essay down my opinion, let me reiterate that I shall encounter difficulties in communicating my thoughts on this topic — to you, and I think that it is vital to mention it because I am not a good interpreter of dreams. Therefore, my expression is wanting in subtlety and precision, tinkering with the subject as one that is difficult to discuss in the public sphere. All I can do is ask you to deliberately ‘stay with’ my reflections.
In this essay, my objective is to introduce a view about the interconnectivity between experience and memory that I plan not to incorporate into any form of psychological or philosophical theory, having claimed not to be a theoretician, perhaps.
In my humble understanding, the language of a Dream comes like an object purchased within the precinct of the doubtful. It is my ‘unawareness’ that detected the many Dreams (and beliefs) nurtured from my childhood were admitted as true, and I am convinced that there are people who functioned just as I did during their childhoods. This is not something to be worried about. As non-adults and adults, our minds have consciously or unconsciously apprehended these “unawarenesses” even when new needs have arisen, consciously or unconsciously.
I am convinced that “Dreams Painted on Canvas” could be explicitly and implicitly discussed outside the philosophical worldview. Carrying on with the ‘outside,’ to me, a Dream is an inquiry into what is valuable, or into what is really important and not important, or I could say a Dream is an inquiry (a) into what is not fully formed, (b) into what is important, and (c) into what we want but don’t know how to define it or what we literally can define but lack the courage to explain it beyond our comprehension of it — at the immediate or later.
Either/or a ‘process’ and ‘destination with superficiality of pride and excessive groundwork of marvelous sensitivity and its upholstery of contentment. I believe if you look, critically, at all these phrases, you will understand the rough edge I painted using a mental Canvas — as to what Dreams are connected or concerned with. Calkins Mary, in her classical psychological journal of 1893, scientifically measured the “Statistics of Dreams,” which, in her time, phenomenon of dreaming was rarely investigated.
Now, the interesting thing that perturbed the above phrases is that each of them is actually used in varying senses. I would say they are ‘interconnected’ and ‘inter-acting’ with each other. In his 1976 philosophical review, Dennett asked, “Are Dreams Experiences?” He tried to abridge Dream with sensation and thought. I would like to stretch Dennett’s question to ask the following questions: (i) Are Dreams fiction? (ii) Could Dreams be commercialized? and (iii) Metaphysically, could Dream be a ‘being’ or can we in-breathe life into it and give it a tag? Perhaps name it something with wings that can fly.
On a personal note, I don’t have any (absolute) examples of dreams to give because I have not encountered any dream not obscured or blurred from merging into tangential. This is why, in this essay, I summoned the abstraction of Canvas to make sense of dreams portrayed wittingly. Notwithstanding, I cannot fathom what Freud had on mind when he described a dream as “the fulfillment of a wish,” in his 1902 book entitled “The Interpretation of Dreams,” two years after he was awarded an associate professorship. But we can figure out when we peruse the book analytically.
Finally, individually, our dreams are possessive. Collectively, our dreams are persuasive and sometimes biased. Neither the former nor the latter, the credence of the parliamentary gesture that makes a dream a dream is that the human consciousness, in agreement with Sigmund Freud’s inference, when subjected to a difficult task abandons the ethos of the Dream to answer the roll call of the dream as fulfillment of a wish — possibly because the human consciousness is what I may call a colony.
©Chidozie Compassion Ogbanu 2025
Image copyright: Wavebreakmedia, baona
