I have an issue with dream scenes – not with their fairly common use in literature and film, but with how dream scenes are almost always presented. They are almost never truly dreamlike. They’re too consistent.
Last night I had another of those pastor nightmares where I was repeatedly frustrated in attempts to conduct worship service. First I was improperly dressed, next the children were preparing to put on their play in one wing and in the next moment they were seated across the front of the main sanctuary. Then the issue was not attire, but not having a service bulletin that I did not write to know how to lead the service. One moment the building resembled one at which I served as pastor, in the next moment it resembled the combined church and parsonage where I attended as a teen. Then the issue was not the lack of a service bulletin, but the lack of a Bible (in church!). I asked for one of the pew Bibles that I knew we had purchased, but no one could find one. Then I found one in the crevices of the sofa (another setting change) but when I opened it, it had doubled in size and become a Bible encylcopedia stuffed with supplementary papers and newspaper articles. So I went to the bedroom and found another Bible and opened to make sure it really was a Bible. It was, but the next time I opened it, it was a collection of small Hebrew booklets and tracts. My wife advised me that maybe stress was getting to me so I went back along the broken sea wall on the shore.
I’ve left out many details, but included enough, I think, to make the point. While the frustration of not being able to conduct the worship service dominated the whole dream, everything else – setting, people present, artifacts, specific obstacles – changed moment by moment with no logical consistency, and yet did not seem inconsistent during the dream. This inconsistency has been a feature of very dream I can remember.
It’s not that the fantastic and impossible cannot happen in dreams. I have dreamed of being able to levitate at will. That Dorothy might dream of munchkins, a yellow brick road, flying monkeys, a witch that “melts” from a splash of water, and the like is all plausible as a dream; but in a real dream the road wouldn’t stay yellow or even a road, the lion would become a giraffe yet still be the same character or not, she wouldn’t travel along the road from place to place but would immediately change locations without questioning it, and what had been the Emerald City when she left on her mission could be a silver castle on her return and she wouldn’t have noticed the change.
I don’t know if logically consistent dreams exist; I have never been in someone else’s head. But I have never experienced one. Therefore, while I can understand the use of dream scenes in literature and film, I don’t find them credible as dreams.